Editorial August 22, 1914 Issue

An Opened Door

John B. Willis

How pleasant it is, these summer days, to think of the many long-confined workers who in their turn are reveling in the freedom of the woods and fields and sky! The plea for escape from drudgery, the privilege of action that is impelled by natural impulse and not by grim necessity,—how instinctive and normal it is! More than this, how universal and appealing its protest against the saddening fact that there are so many faithful and worthy toilers to whom a vacation is quite unknown! Surely nothing can add a sweeter note to the Christian Scientist's outing program than the consciousness that with his own hands, in kindly, generous ways, he has provided some "shut-in," for a little time at least, with the sweet sunlight and fragrant air of a larger life. This is surely one of the meanings of what Mrs. Eddy has named "Christ's Christianity" (Science and Health, p. 271).

When one thinks of the abundance of the natural provisions for the supply of every human need, he can but recognize that while shiftlessness and good-for-nothingness may merit no consideration, save an honest investigation of its cause, involuntary poverty, the struggle for existence which means unremitting enslavement to work, certainly does not speak for the possession of a fair chance for one who is anxious and ready to meet every demand of honest living. On the contrary, it speaks for the present-day fact of what Burns so well named "man's inhumanity to man;" and in the multiplication of such instances we can but grant the reasonableness of the agitation against the wrong of any economic condition which effects this result, although in its intensity such agitation may seem to menace the peace if not the permanence of the communal life as at present organized.

To every such human problem the teaching of Christian Science immediately relates itself in its unequivocal stand for that genuine Christian brotherhood which can and will remove every unjust inequality of opportunity, and in its demonstration that spiritual apprehension supplies not only the inspiration but the capacity to do. It is convincing men anew that the eternal freedom and strength of Truth is an available and saving asset. The vast majority of Christian believers do not think of the association of faith and physical breakdown in honest work as in any sense contradictory or incongruous; and yet how clearly St. Paul defined the true status and capacity of the man of God, when he declared, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." Though it has been selfishly torpid for so long, today we can rejoice in the fact that the world is making great strides in the effort to remove the unfair economic conditions which handicap many; and yet more, that it is being awakened through Christian Science to the deeper, more pitiful, and far more universal cry of those who are not only bound but tortured at the hands of false material sense.

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