Editorial March 16, 1918 Issue

The Happiness of Thinking

William P. McKenzie

The thinker is the true helper of mankind. Concerning this, Mrs. Eddy says in her Message for 1900 (p. 3): "The right thinker and worker does his best, and does the thinking for the ages. No hand that feels not his help, no heart his comfort." She further says: "They who love a good work or good workers are themselves workers who appreciate a life, and labor to awake the slumbering capability of man. And what the best thinker and worker has said and done, they are not far from saying and doing." Mortal mind, however, is afraid of the thinker, and in every nation devises plans whereby to make his way difficult. In one land, for example, it will establish ancestor worship and try to clamp with the rigid hand of the past the ceremonies of the present, and the actions of men, women, and children who are alive.

In other countries it will be the utterances of some wise talker or theologian of the past that are fashioned into shackles wherewith to limit the thinker. Or it may be the king who, accepting the title of defender of the faith, sets out to formulate the faith he will defend and expects the nation to cease its own thinking and accept his changing formulations. It has been in the realm of religion that there has been most fear of the thinker, because in that realm naturally there is desire for fixity and peace. Mortal mind presents a false peace of dogma and a mechanical fixity of tradition from the past, but if you accept the ancestor and his tradition, if you accept evil heredity and perverted or incomplete views of God, you let the past build a prison house for the present.

Once a tomb was built according to the plans of one who wished his monument to endure to the end of time. Every effort was made to have it as enduring as the mountains, and it bore a boastful inscription defying time. But life is not to be defied. In a tiny crevice of the mausoleum there lodged a seed. Winds laden with invisible dust brought it soil for its need and the impartial rain watered it. At last the roots of the growing plant, with the irresistible power of life, rent the tomb of the theorist who thought that death could defy life, and made of it a heap of stones which became a garden for the green tree. So it is and always will be when we are dealing with life triumphant. In the realm of thought we should recognize that the assorting of beliefs and traditions accepted from our own past, or the endeavor to incase ourselves within the once accepted theory, is not real living, for living means thinking, and thinking means recognition of Principle, which again is Life.

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