Editorial April 17, 1920 Issue

A New Heaven and a New Earth

Frederick Dixon

The overturning force of Principle cannot be stayed in the physical universe. The leaven of Truth is perpetually at work. And though men, in their material blindness, may misconstrue the signs of the times, the metaphysician makes no mistake about them. To the idealist the great war was to be the entrance chamber to a new heaven and a new earth. But this heaven and this earth, though he realized it not, were to be equally of the earth earthy. The hopes of the world were to find their expression, after the terrors and agonies of the battle field, in a peace whose symbol was to be ease in matter. The chief baker and the chief butler were to lie down together, and the senses were to lead them. The human mind did not, of course, put it so crudely as that; the human mind never does. All the same it was what it meant. The to-morrow of "Jack Johnsons" and "Big Berthas" was to be a tomorrow of lotus leaves.

There is, however, an ancient proverb, a proverb which, if Master William Langland is correct, we owe as usual to the Greeks, and of them to Plato, to the effect that man proposes, but God disposes. What Plato, or whoever coined the expression, really meant was obviously that men play with material effects, with a vanity which has not yet even discovered that the word itself means nothingness, and remain all unconscious that the only real power is the spiritual causation underlying everything. It was this causation which, overturning and overturning human vanities, brought about the great war. It was this causation, still overturning and overturning, which brought about the great peace—a peace which is only war under a new name. For, just as Jesus the Christ told men of the first century, "I [the Christ, Truth] came not to send peace, but a sword," so, the metaphysician of the twentieth century is able to realize that the more Truth displaces the lie of the human mind the more furiously must rage the chemicalization to which Mrs. Eddy refers on page 401 of Science and Health, when she writes, "What I term Chemicalization is the upheaval produced when immortal Truth is destroying erroneous mortal belief."

The great war stirred the depths of human nature. It brought to the surface all that was at once best and worst in it. And when the war was over this best and worst could no more lie down together than the lion and the lamb. Prohibition was found fighting with appetite, suffrage with sex domination, class equality with class discrimination, and everywhere purity with impurity, and selfishness with selflessness. It was a new phase, that was all, of the old struggle between good and evil, of Merodach with Tiamat, as the pagan ages pictured it, which in Christian theology was symbolized as the battle of Michael with the dragon. "The determination," as Mrs. Eddy writes on page 28 of Science and Health, "to hold Spirit in the grasp of matter is the persecutor of Truth and Love."

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