Editorial March 12, 1921 Issue

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Frederick Dixon

When the psalmist wrote, "Be still, and know that I am God," he certainly gave to his readers a tolerably clear warning to keep politics out of religion. It is a warning, nevertheless, which a great body of those readers have been loath to take. The reason for this is, of course, perfectly clear. They imagine, like the fly in the adage, that it is they, and not Principle, who turn the wheels of the divine mill. Thus they substitute caucusing for demonstration, and are forever shouldering their way into the limelight to steady the ark. All this arises from a total misunderstanding of the relation of man to God, Principle. Its generation is to be found in the philosophy of matter, which represents the human being as an original thinker and actor, whereas he is nothing but the subjective condition of the human mind which orders all his thoughts and actions. It is this human mind whose passions, wrought up to a certain pitch, render an explosion, in the shape of a war, an inevitability, which some king or government yields to the mesmerism of declaring, thus rendering himself or themselves servants to the suggestion which is obeyed, just as, in the same way, it is the human mind which declares a specific drug a poison, so that the individual drinking it succumbs to the poison, owing to having previously placed himself beneath the law.

Without, apparently, grasping the scientific reason for his immunity from evil, the psalmist realized that that immunity had its foundations in obedience to God, Principle. The whole Book of the Psalms is filled, from one end to the other, with outpourings of gratitude for this fact and triumphant pride in it. Later there came Jesus Christ, with his simple explanation of the truth, giving to the fishermen of Galilee and the shepherds of Judea an explanation more elaborately wrought out in Paul's teaching of the law, "I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members." Not one of Paul's readers in Rome understood what this meant as well as he did himself. Saul of Tarsus knew all about this supposititious law in his members, which made of him a persecutor and a relier upon force: Paul the apostle had discovered what law truly was, that love was law, and that the human laws of sin, disease, and death were nothing but counterfeits of love, the law of the inward man.

The kings of this earth had built fleets, and formed armies, to protect themselves against dangers, and to become dangers in themselves. The peoples of the earth had listened to generations of astrologers and diviners, priests and healers, offering them everything, from spells and incantations to herbs and reptile-powders, for the health of their bodies. But all the time one little nation had placed reliance, against all ills, upon God, Principle, until there arose amongst them a great prophet, the man whose wonderful knowledge of Principle fed multitudes, healed the sick, and raised the dead. When, however, his secret was sought, it proved to be no reliance on the divining power of the human mind, but a realization of the fact that God, Principle, the omnipotent power, was Love. As Paul was one day to put it, in that wonderful letter to the Church in Corinth, "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal," and so on throughout the whole of that unapproachable passage which, in the Revised Editions, ends, "But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

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