Editorial February 12, 1921 Issue

Tithes

Frederick Dixon

The history of the word tithes is not dissimilar to that of many others in the language. It began in some idea of propitiation, it was continued as an act of gratitude, it is finding a purely metaphysical significance. The idea, is, of course, much older than the history of Israel, nor was it confined to the Semitic race. It originated in the fear of all primitive peoples for their deities. These gods, whom they endowed with their own worst passions, suitably magnified, were represented, by a cunning priesthood, as demanding a tenth of the fruits of the people's labors. If this were not forthcoming then trouble was to be expected. Failure of the next year's crop, murrain amongst the cattle and the flocks, even plagues amongst owners themselves. As superstition faded, as a truer sense of Principle began to dawn, Olympus and its kindred heavens fell into gradual disrepute. The Israel of Abram, if the term may be permitted, led the way into monotheism, and the theory of the payment of tithes began slowly to be reconstituted on the basis of gratitude for God's mercies. Then came the dawn of Christianity, and the restatement of religious faith on a metaphysical basis. "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets," Christ Jesus declared, in the Sermon on the Mount: "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil."

The second century of the Christian era saw the laughing of the gods out of Rome, mainly owing to the satire of Lucian, the pagan disciple of the philosopher Epictetus. A little later the road was opened to the teaching of Christianity in its pure metaphysical significance. Miserably enough, the destruction of the culture of pagan Rome, unreplaced by this metaphysical teaching, was already beginning to envelop the western world in the ignorance of the dark ages. Slowly and painfully Christianity had to fight its way back to some understanding of its lost metaphysics. The medieval period saw the struggle to give to the nations the Bible in the vernacular. The renaissance witnessed, in the revival of letters, the restoration of the right to think. The era of modern history dawned with its long and fluctuating battle between education and superstition. And then, at last, in the nineteenth century, came the rediscovery, in the new world, of Christian metaphysics, in what the Discoverer, Mrs. Eddy, named Christian Science. "In the year 1866," she writes, on page 107 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," "I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science."

The writing of Science and Health required the making of a whole body of fresh definitions, arrived at by a process of devolution, and in the course of these Mrs. Eddy defined tithe, on page 595 of Science and Health, as: "Contribution; tenth part; homage; gratitude. A sacrifice to the gods." Anybody can see from this how exactly the historical meaning of the word has been preserved, and how its full metaphysical significance has been left open to the exploration of the student. To the mere ceremonial keepers of the law, eighteen centuries before Mrs. Eddy wrote, Christ Jesus had said, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel." What, of course, Christ Jesus was condemning was not the payment of tithes according to the law, but the idea that any such material payment could possibly be substituted for the contribution of love, or the gratitude of spiritual understanding. The whole futility of such an idea was to be exposed one day, in its nonsensical ultimate, when the nonconformist farmer, in England, found himself charged with the payment of tithes to a church from whose doctrines he was a dissenter.

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