Editorial November 13, 1920 Issue

The Hope of the Machinists

Frederick Dixon

The decision of the machinists of the United States to call an international conference of the machinists throughout the world, for the purpose of rendering future wars impossible by the curtailment or nonproduction of the engines of war, is an indication of the growing solidarity of human thought, a phenomenon capable of many extraordinary possibilities. For the present purpose the political aspects of the case are entirely without significance, even when those aspects touch so vital a point as the capability of the national elements to put aside their international prejudices and jealousies and to work together not for the nation but for humanity. What is interesting is the manifestation, which is spreading over the entire world, of a realization of the fact that if you break down the spirit of unity at the frontier lines of the nations you repudiate Christianity in its very inception. Mrs. Eddy quoting, on page 340 of Science and Health, the famous words from Exodus, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," goes on to comment on them with this wonderful insight, "The First Commandment is my favorite text. It demonstrates Christian Science. It inculcates the triunity of God, Spirit, Mind; it signifies that man shall have no other spirit or mind but God, eternal good, and that all men shall have one Mind. The divine Principle of the First Commandment bases the Science of being, by which man demonstrates health, holiness, and life eternal."

This being so, it is more than interesting to watch the means, however crude and formless, by which the instincts of good are endeavoring to give expression to ultimate truths. The resolution of the International Association of Machinists is the expression of just such striving. It is, of course, to everybody with a clear metaphysical perception, an attempt to put the cart before the horse. But that, in a world which has not yet grasped the significance of spiritual causation, is inevitable. None the less, however, is it the effect of an aroused spiritual understanding, which is causing Adam to turn uneasily in his sleep. One day he will, of course, awake and sit up, and then he will no longer see in a glass darkly, but will gaze face to face into reality. In the meantime it is the ever-broadening influence of Truth which is causing Adam's restlessness. "God," Mrs. Eddy writes, on pages 223-224 of Science and Health, "will overturn, until 'He come whose right it is.' Longevity is increasing and the power of sin diminishing, for the world feels the alterative effect of truth through every pore."

If, then, the world is wise, it will begin to regard every decision such as that of the machinists from a very different point of view to that which it does at present. It will see behind such movements the inspiration of Truth, and instead of hurrying to take sides in a political line-up, it will endeavor to probe the matter a little deeper, to sift the chaff from the wheat, in other words, to side with Principle rather than with men, lest haply it "be found even to fight against God." The effort to do this must, of course, be an individual one, and if the individual is wise it will be made without reference to his neighbors, but rather in the spirit of Paul's great simile, in his letter to the church in Philippi, taken presumably from the Isthmian games, "Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before." It is thus and thus alone that the individual can become a good citizen, and it is only out of an individuality of good citizens that a great nation can be resolved.

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