Editorial December 1, 1917 Issue

An Available Chaplain

William P. McKenzie

Let there be court or commons, army or navy, public institution or secret society, and apparently there needs to be a chaplain. With regiment or ship, legislative assembly or king's house, he is looked upon as the official representative of the unseen, the spiritual. He is the reciter of services whereby thought can be lifted from mundane affairs upward, if possible, to divine harmony. Yet even with "the organ grand and the choiring band" and the service intoned, thought may not arise to heavenly flight. With formality may come familiarity, and the exquisite words of the chanted psalms or the intoned prayers may be words only, mere words, to the listener. But let a man find something awake within himself, a keen desire after God that kindles like flame and burns on while he is pondering, then he wants the substance, not the form, the meaning that accounts for words. Was it not of such an experience as this the psalmist was speaking when he said, "My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned"? We call that available which has power or efficacy for the accomplishment of the purpose or object in view. An available chaplain would be one efficacious in reminding men of the goodness of God, and such a chaplain might be not a person but an available book.

To those who are earnest seekers there may now come a chaplain, available and impersonal, needing no chapel, no vestments, no procession of singers, no organ diapason. The hillside or the deep woods will be cathedral enough, the little hut with its meager candle will be chapel sufficient, for this chaplain is in from a little book. It is a great book, too, the outstanding gift of the nineteenth century to the twentieth. But the edition of it referred to is a little book, a bibelot, suitable not only for the art lover's cabinet but for the pocket of the soldier's tunic as well. It will fit the sailor's ditty-bag, the surveyor's pouch, or the saddles bags of the cowboy or the cavalryman. It is the vest pocket edition of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." This book, the Christian Science textbook written by Mary Baker Eddy, has been for twenty-two years associated with the Bible in all the public services of the Christian Science movement throughout the world. Mrs. Eddy in her dedicatory sermon January 6, 1895, whereby the first building of The Mother Church was opened for services, said (Pulpit and Press, p. 7): "I have ordained the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, 'Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,' as pastor of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston,—so long as this church is satisfied with this pastor. This is my first ordination."

In the year when this ordination occurred, the churches of the Christian Science movement were few. Since that date the simple form of service has circled the globe, and the churches and societies have increased fifteen hundred percent. By this new plan for bookmaking the textbook of

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