Article August 11, 1917 Issue

Ending Wars

ROSEMARY BAUM HACKETT

On page 565 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy thus interprets the warfare between the woman and the dragon, as described in the Apocalypse: "After the stars sang together and all was primeval harmony, the material lie made war upon the spiritual idea; but this only impelled the idea to rise to the zenith of demonstration, destroying sin, sickness, and death, and to be caught up unto God,—to be found in its divine Principle."

When the true idea of God and man dawns upon thought through the activity of Christian Science, it glorifies individual consciousness with glimpses of "new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." The man of God's creating becomes a real and living presence, and the heart overflows with the joy of recognizing the verity of spiritual existence. For a time these views of reality make easy the task of denying and rejecting evil's suppositional claim to place and power. God's goodness and its reflection is seen to be the one substantial fact of man's experience. Later, however, the lie of life in matter begins to uncover its nature as enmity against God, by seeming to resist and reverse in human consciousness the unfolding of the true idea of good. The soldier of Christ discovers that if he is to remain loyal to his calling and master this falsity with "the sword of the Spirit," he must open his eyes to behold as nothing every one of its snares and entanglements, together with its more aggressive delusions of mortal mind.

In the early stages of this warfare the temptation to make something out of nothing is particularly strong. The mortal concept of man, the seeming reflection of mortal mind, appears like a very real person, whether claiming to be one's self or another. Hate, fear, sleep, seem in many instances to usurp the throne of Love, and mental integrity to become the prey of malicious suggestion. Mortals are seen viewing each other through a mist of distrust and misunderstanding which magnifies human faultiness, or else bewitched by a glamour of personality into calling evil good. To recognize that these abnormal mental conditions are being induced and fostered by malicious hypnotism seems temporarily to make them more appalling. Evil appears in consciousness as something that has intelligence to conceive plots and power to execute them, as something that is identified with person, race or nation, with class or with organization, and all the beliefs of human courage, personal righteousness, and instinctive faith in good seem powerless to defend mankind from the encroachments of the "great red dragon."

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