Editorial October 4, 1919 Issue

"Loose him, and let him go"

Ella W. Hoag

There is an insistent cry in every human heart for freedom. Every mortal feels an inherent demand that he break loose from fetters which seem to limit him in every direction and which clog his every step toward progress. The great difficulty through the ages has been that mankind has conceived of its bonds as material. Always looking to matter for both good and evil, it has been continually tossed back and forth between mistaken concepts of supposed pain and pleasure, of disaster and success, of loss and gain. It has attempted to erect its false hopes and satisfactions, only to have them crumble to dust while they were still in the making. Then, too, human belief has almost invariably insisted that its fetters have been forged by something outside of itself, by this hampering circumstance, by that limiting relationship. Its difficulties have been thus credited to influences from without, and because of inability to control apparently extraneous conditions men have either given up all effort in despair, excusing themselves for their dissatisfactions, mistakes, and failures by blaming somebody or something other than themselves, or they have found their struggles well-nigh endless and their accomplishments, at best, little more than a transitory sense of good.

To this as to all human problems Christian Science comes with its illuminating message of divine intelligence and love. When it elucidates the truth that God is infinite Spirit, divine Mind, and that His creation therefore is—must be—spiritual, divinely mental, it opens the door of freedom to each and every one. From this truth the conclusion may be quickly drawn that the thing which binds and limits, which hampers and obstructs is always the belief in a selfhood apart from God,—the belief in a selfhood in matter.

Then the only way one can ever be loosed from evil is for him to learn that he exists as an individual child of God and that the loosing must be accomplished by his own relinquishment, in his own consciousness, of the opposite testimony. There is where the destruction of the claims of bondage must occur so far as he is concerned. There is where he must refuse to entertain the beliefs which testify to limitations and to control by something less than God Himself. When he once lays hold of this glorious truth and really begins to put it into practice he has started on the way to complete emancipation from belief in bondage of any name or nature.

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