Editorial January 13, 1917 Issue

"The healing of the nations"

William D. McCrackan

Divine Love alone can water the tree which bears the leaves for "the healing of the nations." Love alone is sufficient for this task,—deep enough, constant and courageous enough, to speak with authority and command peace. But divine Love also fulfils the law and forgives sin by destroying it. Divine Love initiates the process in the human heart which makes good attractive and evil repellent, which by its unwavering compassion separates personal sense from person, and so saves men and nations, but does not destroy them. Nations, which are but manifest states of human consciousness, have individual characteristics imposed upon them by tradition, experience, or unresisted mental suggestion; therefore they need to be awakened to realize their real selfhood as truly as individual human beings need this awakening.

For the vigilant Christian Scientist, watching the course of daily events, every nation becomes a patient to be healed, whose diseases must be unseen, whose sins must be forgiven, and whose harmony must be established in Truth. Nations need to be freed from misconception, condemnation, delusion, sense-intoxication, stagnation, and unjust tyrannies inherited from the past. How then shall the nations be saved if not in the way of God's appointing, through prayer and spiritual understanding? The prayer that saves the sick and the sinning human being by the destruction of error, is also applicable to a nation distraught or to a whole people momentarily hypnotized.

The very Paul of Tarsus who had once been of the strictest sect of the Pharisees, who had been hardened by so-called spiritual pride, and while under the influence of the merciless scholastic theology of his day went about "breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord," was also the very man who out of the ripeness of his spiritual experience could finally write the thirteenth chapter of I Corinthinas and declare, "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." Mere strictness of belief, mere elaboration of rewards and punishments, or mere conformity to the enactments of human righteousness, lead to the martyrdom of a Stephen rather than to the healing of the nations. On the other hand, the illumination of truth which may temporarily blind the material sight of a Paul, also prepares him to be an apostle to the Gentiles, even to the nations of the whole world.

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