Editorial March 5, 1921 Issue

"The ditch of nonsense"

Frederick Dixon

It was once said of "the preacher" that he was the only wise man known to the world, and that his wisdom amounted to a confession of supreme ignorance. As a matter of fact that is scarcely a fair way of putting it. The preacher did emphatically rate all merely human knowledge and all purely material effort as vanity, but he did not regard this as everything or even as the main thing. Vanity, it must be remembered, meant to the preacher, not strutting in the sun, like a peacock, but just nothingness. The "lying vanities," then, of the Psalmist were the empty falsehoods of human existence, not the eternal truths of spiritual life. "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter," the preacher winds up the most terrible and sustained of all the many indictments of the material counterfeit of reality: "Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil." That truly, is the conclusion of the whole matter. Truth and error, good and evil, shall be tested on the touchstone of Principle, God, and the error and the evil will be proved to be vanities, unrealities, whilst the truth and the good will be found indestructible.

This being so, it is evident that the world's one wise man, as Congreve is pleased to call him, would have settled matters, so far as that famous dramatist was concerned, by ruling him and all his works amongst the vanities. But this world, from a metaphysical point of view, is made up generally of big and little Congreves, with the result that only the dissenters from the Congrevian platitudes of material reality could hope to be regarded seriously in Jerusalem. To put it a little differently, when Mrs. Eddy wrote in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 242), "Christian Science is absolute; it is neither behind the point of perfection nor advancing towards it; it is at this point and must be practised therefrom," she put herself definitely on the side of the preacher, and swept all the vanities into "the ditch of nonsense." The dealers in vanities may plead to be allowed to indulge in the process of make-believe a little while longer: they are like the demoniacs amongst the tombs. Sooner or later they will be compelled to abandon the vanities, and meet the realities face to face. Mrs. Eddy emphatically gives on page 230 of "Miscellaneous Writings," "They spend no time in sheer idleness, in talking when they have nothing to say, in building aircastles or floating off on the wings of sense: all of which drop human life into the ditch of nonsense, and worse than waste its years."

Imagine a world in which nobody talked unless he had something which it was necessary or desirable to say; a world in which scandal, gossip, and slander died for want of an audience; a world in which when two or three were gathered together the time was spent in profitable and necessary discussion; a world in which, when men were alone, they thought not of themselves but of Principle, and made plans for the good of humanity instead of dreaming dreams of their own future success, power, and glorification. And men will do this in the proportion in which they come to know God, Principle, aright,—to understand divine metaphysics, and to demonstrate the truth of Christian Science. When, in the School for Scandal, Sir Peter Teazle, called away from Lady Sneerwell's party, excuses himself, dryly, to his hostess, by remarking that, thought compelled to remove his body, he leaves his character behind him, the audience invariably explodes in laughter. Yet the satire is so fiercely deserved that the audience should recognize that the Sneerwells and the Candours, the Backbites and the Crabtrees, in dropping life into the ditch of nonsense, were themselves surrendering to all those suggestions of evil which make those guilty of the surrender servants to him they would obey.

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