Editorial July 21, 1917 Issue

Drafting for Service

William D. McCrackan

Drafting for service becomes necessary when humanity lacks sufficient inspiration to volunteer. It becomes advisable when certain elements of the population are eager to have others serve at the front while they themselves remain in safety behind the lines. A desire to preserve self while others sacrifice self ultimates in spiritual death, but Christian Science can save the victims of this would-be mental assassination.

Drafting under these circumstances, therefore, amounts to a human contrivance for bringing the recalcitrant and traitorous, as well as the ignorant desirous of ease in the flesh, from under cover and forcing them to march with the righteous until the lesson of loyalty and fidelity to Truth is learned. More than this, drafting operates to detach those who are really willing to volunteer from the aggressive mental malpractice which seeks to make them unwilling. Mrs. Eddy on page 158 of "Miscellaneous Writings" exhorts her followers in these words: "All God's servants are minute men and women." In her Message of 1901 she writes: "The Christian Scientist has enlisted to lessen sin, disease, and death, and he overcomes them through Christ, Truth, teaching him that they cannot overcome us. The resistance to Christian Science weakens in proportion as one understands it and demonstrates the Science of Christianity" (p. 15).

God drafts His own, thus detaching them from the ties of the flesh. It is necessary for man inwardly to volunteer as a soldier of God, though God has already selected the real man from the beginning as His child who is exempt from sin, disease, and death. This man of God fears no floods, no fire, no gas, nor any of the various forms of destruction invented by the boasted efficiency of mortal mind. The soldier who carries with him the understanding of God's man can no more be touched by explosive or poison than the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace, or Daniel in the lions' den, David facing the highest efficiency of the art of metallurgy of his day in the sword of Goliath, or Paul protecting himself from the viper's sting could suffer harm.

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