Article January 15, 1921 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Edward Shillito, Ozora S. Davis, Raphael Demos, J. St. Loe Strachey, Raymond Pearl, Bruce Barton, Stephen B. Stanton, L. P. Jacks, Henry J. Cadbury, W. R. Inge

["A Torquemada in Miniature"—The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, U.S.A., Dec. 15, 1920]

The love of persecution is an innate feeling of the human mind. Historically it is written, in letters of fire, across the pages of the world's story from Adam to to-day. Philosophically, its reason is to be sought in the little word "fear." If a baby were to shake a fat fist at Mr. Smith in Broadway, Mr. Smith would smile and pass by. But if a roustabout were to do the same thing, Mr. Smith would probably seek the police station and protection. The Smith family, however, is a large one: it has many facets to its character. If the family representative happens to be a clergyman, and finds that Mr. Jones is preaching a doctrine which is considered unorthodox, he gets into his pulpit and gives Mr. Jones as bad a quarter of an hour as any to which Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards ever subjected the sinners of Boston or Northampton. If, again, the Mr. Smith should have joined the medical profession, and should have heard that Mr. Robinson was practicing in an irregular manner, he would no doubt write to the local representative of the medical association, and implore him to take steps to prevent people from being treated by any method save the extremely unsatisfactory one adopted by himself.

Now, if anybody should ask why this Smith trinity should act in such a way as this, the answer is a very simple one: it is, as has been said, in each case, fear. Mr. Smith in Broadway is quite conscious that his muscles are by no means equal to those of a roustabout, but he is equally conscious that he is in no danger from the baby. His purview, for this reason, becomes axiomatic of that of the family. If the Reverend Mr. Smith were certain that the seats in Mr. Jones' church would be empty on Sunday, and those of his own full, he would never trouble to preach against him, and denounce his heresies in the papers. If Smith, M.D., were assured that Mr. Robinson's office would be empty during the week, he would not wast his time writing to the local representative of the medical association. But, as Wordsworth writes, "Fear hath a hundred eyes." It sees dangers all day long where none exist, just because, believing in itself, it cannot trust in Love. That is what the apostle James endeavored to get a fearful world to understand in the first century, and that was why autocracy, the most frightened thing in the world, in the person of Herod, murdered him. That is why orthodoxy, in all the ages, has compiled its indexes, and burned heretical writings, under the delusion that in destroying paper it was obliterating thought. And that is why Thomas Lee Woolwine, district attorney for Los Angeles County, California, is found writing to Dr. Rea Smith, president of the Los Angeles County Medical Society, in an endeavor to stir him up into joining in preaching a crusade, in the twentieth century, against Christian Science.

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