Editorial December 24, 1921 Issue

Victory

Frederick Dixon

The most radical argument in the whole world is that of Christian Science. "If you wish to know the spiritual fact," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 129 of Science and Health, "you can discover it by reversing the material fable, be the fable pro or con,—be it in accord with your preconceptions or utterly contrary to them." This is because the evidence of Truth entirely reverses the evidence of the physical senses. Instead of a world of material phenomena, it offers a world of spiritual ideas. "Metaphysics," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 269 of Science and Health, "resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul." In the same way, Christ Jesus, seated on Jacob's well, outside the city of Samaria, said to his disciples, "Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest."

Now, while Jesus rested on the parapet of the well at Sychar, Cæsar, divus Cæsar, Cæsar the god, as the Romans came to call him, sat on the imperial throne. It was the day of the Roman triumph. The day when the procession of the victorious general swept along the Via Sacra. He had been victorious in a material struggle, and he expressed his triumph in a material manner. His captives followed the wheels of his chariot: in the amphitheater, before the sun set, other captives were to die, making holiday for him and the free men of Rome. The Roman was indeed the least metaphysical of mortals. Life to him was a purely physical problem. Had it been otherwise Horace could never have written that the cattle were safe in the pastures, and the sailor on the main; that the home would remain pure, and that sin would not go unpunished, so long as the worker, coming home at dusk, remembered that all this was owing to the providence of Cæsar, the god. Thus victory of any sort was to the Roman a triumph over another man. He was by nature and training almost incapable of understanding what Christ Jesus meant when he declared, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me," a saying which Paul later compressed into the three words, "I die daily."

What Jesus was endeavoring to tell his listeners, what Paul was struggling to impress upon the church in Corinth, was that the only victory any man can have is over himself; in other words, that the only enemy any one can have is the sum total of all that is unlike God, all that is out of Principle, in his own consciousness. "Simply count your enemy," Mrs. Eddy says, on page 8 of "Miscellaneous Writings," "to be that which defiles, defaces, and dethrones the Christ-image that you should reflect." The only victory there can be, then, is in conquest of the material self, in putting off the old man with his lusts, and putting on the new.

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