Editorial January 1, 1916 ISSUE

Essential Liberty

John B. Willis

In her declarations respecting "the liberty of the children of God," found on pages 224 to 228 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy has named the heart of spiritual impulse, the eternal privilege and opportunity of the spiritual life. The Founder of Christianity broke away from the trammels of both church and clan, the conventional standards and requirements of both social and religious caste. He paid as little regard to orthodox intellectualism as he did to contented stupidity. He refused to be enslaved either by fear or by ties of kinship. He dared to ignore both precedence and tradition, to resist the decress of both ecclesiastical and political authority. In a word, he asserted his freedom from the sovereignty of any and every material sense, however long honored by men. He was the world's great apostle of liberty, the liberty of Love and Truth, and to this role every Christ-man is called.

That we are to follow him here, and keep our eyes fixed on spiritual realities as our rightful possession, regardless of its significance to passing experience, is the great insistence of Christian Science, and no incident in the life of Mrs. Eddy, the Founder of this movement, was more tellingly prophetic than that in which, when but an intuitively sensitive girl, she faced the revered representatives of the church of her fathers and asserted her fealty to her higher spiritual sense, regardless of the judgment and condemnation perchance of the loved ones who marveled at her presumption. It was the appearing of that spirit of progress which in the nature of the case must be non-conformable to everthing that is not demonstrably true.

No subtler temptation comes to men than this, to be satisfied with devotion to a conventional order; and how universally have not only the thoughtless and indifferent but the soberminded and would-be progressive become the victims of this mesmerism. Especially has this been manifest in the history of religious reforms, which have usually had their beginning in the illumination of some individual—a vitally redemptive spiritual idea has found new birth in human consciousness, has stimulated heroic daring and sacrifice, proved its worth by its works, and thus dated a new era. Then, not infrequently those who have come after them, who "have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come," have so yielded to materiality as to become absorbed in the letter of their once vital faith and lose their hold upon its essential redemptive truth. Be it ours so to guard our thought against every temptation to forget our spiritual goal, as to escape the mistake which called forth St. Paul's severe but appealing rebuke to the Galatians, "Now, after that ye have know God, . . . how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?"

Of the menace of this weakening tendency Christian Scientists have been most earnestly warned by their Leader. A falling away of those who are strangers to a scientific faith, who have not been taught the Principle and rule of the Christ-teaching, cannot be surprising, however lamentable. Christian Scientists, however, having been taught how to test the verity and efficiency of their apprehension of divine truth, "have not so learned Christ," and for them to fail would indeed be to "crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame."

So long as a man is in doubt as to the possibility of gaining a demonstrable knowledge of the truth, so long his efforts to acquire this knowledge are sure to be feeble or spasmodic; but let him reach the conviction that Truth is both knowable and provable, and he has found an unfailing stimulus to that honest, continuous effort which merits and will obtain the promised reward. The only faith that cannot become weak and insipid is that which has ripened in the light of revelation into spiritual understanding, and which is daily answering Yea and Amen to Truth's imperative demands.

Spiritual freedom means spiritual efficiency, and it should be guarded as the very Palladium of Christianity. It is the verification of the Master's words, "If the Son . . . shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."

John B. Willis.
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