Editorial April 18, 1914 Issue

One Good versus One Evil

John B. Willis

Mortal belief is forever at war, not only with our sense of unity but with the achievements of unity. It precipitates division and consequent strife in the individual thought, in the home, the community, the church, the state. Selfish and dogmatic, it loves to wrangle, and grows quite vain over its power of disputation, its capacity to disturb and destroy. It is greatly given to idolatry, to the positing of secondary causes to which it assigns the government of definite areas of influence. The mythologies of the East were the direct outcome of the deification of such centers of authority. Hathor, Athena, Venus, and all the rest of them, were believed to have their specific realms over which they ruled with jealous regard for their rights, and thus the lively contentions of the gods, as well as those of other folk, were fully provided for. In all this, mortal belief is opposed not only to the teaching of the Master but to those higher intimations of nature which have always appealed to the sages and poets, and in its divisive falsity we may find an explanation of the constant increase in the varieties of human affliction.

In theory all Christian people aver that life emanates from the one God, but in their every-day beliefs most of them make it the product of the activities of many so-called vital organs. They live in their heart, lungs, stomach, nerves, etc., any one of which, it is believed, is able, through inaction or overaction, to disturb and destroy all the others. Physical organs are thus given a distinctive relation to life, and specialists in the practice of medicine are appealed to with the same longing hope that impelled the Athenians to seek to placate their gods. Thus men have come to think that the harmony and peace which constitute health, are dependent upon the varying states of various things, most of which can only be guessed at.

Under these circumstances the hazards of health naturally come to be thought of as very numerous indeed, and preventive hygienic requirements are correspondingly increasing. Today, he who undertakes to provide for all the advertised possibilities of peril, is necessarily solicitous about so many material things as to have little if any time for the cultivation of the spiritual life. This is the saddening side of the devotion of well-meaning physicians and others to the exploitation of disease in the public school and the public press. Misdirected zeal to a good end has become the greatest hindrance to its achievement. Humanity's material efforts to secure freedom are doubly riveting its chains, and this because men have quite forgotten the Master's words, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." He recognized God, Spirit, as the only basis of life, and Truth, revealed and loved, as the only physician.

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