Article June 11, 1921 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from DeWitt L. Pelton, Allen Chesterfield, James Bryce

["Custom"—The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, U.S.A., April 15, 1921]

It is fear that impels a man to follow custom rather than right. His grip on custom blinds him to the freedom of infinite Principle, God, whose unchanging custom is good and limitless. He is quite convinced that ruination will follow if he gets out of the rut of doing things in the usual manner. In spite of the adamant ignorance of what constitutes true unfoldment, the customary thing is having a hard siege in this day and the usual manner of thinking and doing is being shaken to its foundation. For instance, when the earth was found to be round and not flat it changed the custom of the then known world, and its thinking had to be adjusted to the new condition. The greatest blow to hydra-headed custom was when Jesus, after having been sealed in a rock tomb, demonstrated that matter, even as stone, had no substance. The Jews tried their best to keep the man who demonstrated Truth in the tomb; they sealed it tightly and placed their soldiers to guard it. Nevertheless Christ Jesus' knowledge of custom, substance, Life, pierced the claim of matter as substance, and he stepped forth from the tomb, much to the Jews' consternation and dismay. Jesus met great opposition when he insisted on healing the sick on the Sabbath; when he preached in the temple and converted people to the worship of one supreme God, instead of many gods. Certainly they did not want religion placarded in the money markets where men might see and understand and be healed of greed and lust and hate. Evil did not then and does not now want the true idea of commercialism where evil claims it has power as commerce, because it means de struction to dishonest commerce.

Christ Jesus proved that God is always with man, whether he be in the place of buying and selling or in the tabernacle. He took religion into the presence of the money changers. Jesus broke more customs than any man that ever lived. His business was breaking old, hidebound, ignorant methods of worshiping God. He preached a living God, or divine Principle, a supreme God, as powerful in the mart or on the street corner as in the synagogue. Men must awaken from the sleepy, indolent apathy that rocks them on and on into the belief of following custom, rather than intelligent, right reasoning. Resisting God will not keep His presence from being demonstrated, because there is no way that true, correct thinking can be barred even from the midst of the money markets, and God is Mind, always thinking.

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