Editorial August 21, 1920 Issue

Policy

Frederick Dixon

Several centuries ago Cervantes declared, in a famous sentence which has since become a proverb, that honesty is the best policy. As a matter of fact Cervantes was really insisting, without knowing it, that all policy was bad. For if honesty, which is necessarily truth, were the best policy, then any phase of dishonesty, not being truth, must be outside the whole range of policy, which, like evil, would comprise various degrees of iniquity. This is only another way of saying that a thing either is in Principle or out of Principle, and is consequently good or bad. There are no degrees of good, for good is absolute, and in the same way there are no degrees of honesty, for honesty is absolute. Argal, as the clown says in Hamlet, honesty is not policy at all, it is a divine attribute, and the variations of policy, which constitute so many degrees of departure from Principle, are never honest, and are therefore very much what Hamlet himself atrabiliously described a politician as being, namely, one who would circumvent God, Principle.

Now it is impossible to tell a lie about nothing, just as it would be impossible for evil to as much as seem to be if there were no such thing as good. Evil is the absence of good, just as a lie is the absence of truth. Policy, therefore, could not exist, even supposititiously, unless it were a lie about something actually existing. It is defined in the dictionaries as political sagacity, statecraft, or craftiness, and here you have its various deviations from Principle. But political sagacity, statecraft, and craftiness are all of them efforts to display human wisdom; consequently policy is the lie about, or counterfeit of, divine wisdom,—in other words, it is foolishness. That must be perfectly obvious to anybody who will consent to be logical, and not to fool himself by casuistical hairsplitting. Any person who, however slightly, departs from honesty, may succeed, for the moment, in deceiving somebody else, and gaining a personal or a public end. In doing this he may congratulate himself upon his political sagacity, his statecraft, or his craftiness. But what has he actually achieved? In the terrible sentence of Christ Jesus, he may have gained the whole world, but he will have lost his own soul; and what will it advantage him in the great struggle, throughout eternity, to have gained a petty advantage, for a few years, at the cost of widening the distance between himself and Principle, which has been increasing ever since he consented to depart at a tangent from Truth. "The divine method of paying sin's wages," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 240 of Science and Health, "involves unwinding one's snarls, and learning from experience how to divide between sense and Soul."

It is just this dividing between sense and Soul, between material inclination and spiritual understanding, which is involved in the surrender to policy. "Human policy," Mrs. Eddy writes in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 212), "is a fool that saith in his heart, 'No God'—a caressing Judas that betrays you, and commits suicide. This godless policy never knows what happiness is, and how it is obtained." Now, remembering that in Principle it is impossible to diverge from Principle, that in honesty there can be no shade of dishonesty, it becomes perfectly apparent that there is no such thing as divine policy, because policy constitutes a choice between expedients, and in Principle there are no expedients, there is only absolute Truth. This makes it clear why human policy is, as Mrs. Eddy says, a fool. It declares there is no God, no Principle, and in saying that it becomes the Judas which betrays at the very moment when it is professing to give the individual the kiss of peace, ease in the senses. In doing that it commits suicide, for it expresses its own apartness from Principle, and so its own nothingness, since everything that professes to exist outside Principle has no existence whatever, but is a mere negation of Truth.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Editorial

All Good Is Immortal