Editorial September 20, 1919 Issue

Release the Truth

William P. McKenzie

Falsity has too many advocates and friends. Those whose deeds are evil love to argue that there will always be shadow in the world wherein they can hide. They declare that good men will always be their victims, and that "the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life" will always reap the harvest of other people's sowing—like the Afghan hill tribe marauding the peaceful valleys every year. Jesus characterized this view by saying that "men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."

Mrs. Eddy says, "The history of our country, like all history, illustrates the might of Mind, and shows human power to be proportionate to its embodiment of right thinking" (Science and Health, p. 225). It must be, therefore, desirable that right thinking should find the widest possible publication. In publishing information we find that the socalled freedom of the press has both benefit and bane. At a time of world crisis, when some God-guided statesman is trying to work the works of God in evil days, then too often is the time for bitterness and cruel misinterpretation to be expressed in print, which the multitude of the thoughtless take at its face value without appraising the motives of the writers. Consequently the good man, who in after years may be looked upon as the savior of his country, is, in his actual labor of saving his countrymen from evil, assailed by every kind of brutality and hindrance; and why? Just because those whom he is working to benefit hold to a belief that a partnership with evil can be beneficial, each one wishing to cherish his own peculiar affection for things beneath, so that he is unready for whole-souled acceptance of good as the reality without any opposite.

Thus to every thinker not exactly true there remains a side door for the tempter, an avenue for the mesmerist, whereby too often one who may be honestly called good can become the enemy of the noblest and best. The misguided people, as Jesus said, kill the prophets and stone the messengers of Mind, and then repenting raise monuments to their rejected benefactors. Mrs. Browning speaks of poets as "the only truth tellers left to God." The insight of the poet has sometimes made him a prophet and a revealer of spiritual good; but again there have been poets who too often have concealed the bitter and poison of lust in a syrup of phraseology, and presented to the imagination of men such mental pictures as they must strive painfully to forget as they progressively awake to true thinking.

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