Article September 7, 1918 Issue

The Inspiration of Sacrifice

NELLIE B. MACE

It is the hour of sacrifice. Men and nations are being pledged to unstinted devotion and self-forgetfulness, pledged to give all that they love and all that they have, humanly speaking, to redeem the world from the domination of evil. What is the substance of this devotion? What is the inspiration of this intense sacrifice of material things, this giving up of the freedom to follow individual aims and pursuits, this offering of the human sense of life, if need be, that the world may be brought to a truer understanding of life and liberty?

The day of the superficial analysis of the world struggle has long since passed. Nation after nation has been drawn into the conflict whether it would or not, and individuals, one by one, have been compelled to consider and perhaps revise their heart's allegiance. Out of hesitating and fluctuating opinions the conviction gradually emerged that the issue was joined between democratic and autocratic ideals of government. But what of the origin of those ideals? A clearer distinction is being made between spirituality and materiality, between the creative divine Mind with its spiritual phenomena and the false carnal mind with its sense phenomena; and men are everywhere being driven to a deeper analysis of the world struggle.

To those who will understand, Christian Science reveals the absolute nature of Spirit, its all-inclusiveness and its harmony. As a consequence of this better understanding of the allness of Spirit and the perfection of spiritual man and the universe, the evanescence, the illusiveness and unreality of the material world and all sense testimony, is recognized. In the spiritual reality there is no struggle, nothing that needs to make any sacrifice to atone for departure from the ideal, since all of God's ideas exist forever in perfect unity with divine Principle. The sense of sacrifice is a wholly human concept; it is the measure of the human mind's separation from Principle, and it necessitates, therefore, in the final sense, the renunciation of all materiality. Although there were long historic periods in which a perverted sense of sacrifice resulted in merely superstitious and idolatrous rites, yet sacrifice in its original and true sense has ever stood as a type of the destruction, through allegiance to the ideal, of whatever obstructive belief lies between the human mind and divine Principle.

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