Editorial September 1, 1917 Issue

Labor

William D. McCrackan

The habit of using the team labor to mean merely manual work springs from the materialism of the age. Therefore the troubles which have grown up around what is termed labor can be corrected only by spiritual understanding. All work is originally mental because it requires thought at the source. There can be no absolute line of separation between the man who plans the city and him who digs the trench. They are both thinking beings, and if they stopped thinking the spade would drop from the hand of the one as surely as the pen from the hand of the other. Antagonism between the workshop and the office, wherever it exists, is based upon the supposition that the work done in the first is manual and in the second mental. The truth is that as the world moves today all work is becoming more mental. Machinery performs what seems to require intelligence, but the intelligence is not in the machine, it is expressed by man.

From the supposition that some kinds of work can be merely manual, there has arisen a certain disdain of labor on the one hand and a natural resentment on the part of the laborer. The workshop has even been pushed to overvalue its services in order, as it supposed, to safeguard its rights against the office. Hence the labor troubles which the unscrupulous mental manipulator has sought to use to his advantage in creating internal difficulties in order that external duties might be neglected. All men are really workers to some extent, and should be coworkers ; the lines between them should not be those of separation but of coordination, and as their work becomes increasingly mental, as it inevitably must, they should find their unity in Mind, not in matter, and thus establish the brotherhood of man.

All honest work has its place and should have its reward, for "the laborer is worthy of his hire," but the increase comes only with the understanding that God is Mind and Spirit and man mental and spiritual. Looking to matter for wages fills the hand with the wages of sin, which is death; looking to Spirit for supply keeps the water of life ever flowing and fresh day by day. Jesus warned his generation against laboring for matter when he said, "Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you." What can endure unto everlasting life except that which is by nature eternal? Christian Science reveals Truth, Life, and Love as substance and "incapable of discord and decay" (Science and Health, p. 468).

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