Editorial September 10, 1921 Issue

Disillusionment

Gustavus S. Paine

A man cannot hate another man whom he really knows, for though he may pity the mortal weakness that he observes, he must comprehend that the suggestions to which the weak one has succumbed are only such as mortal mind would offer in diverse forms to all. In Christ Jesus, "we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin." Instead of hating the one who has fallen far short of our ideal of what he should be, we need to turn forthwith to the divine Mind and find there the true idea of man. Since the true idea is the unlimited expression of divine intelligence, always has expressed only intelligence, and is now manifesting intelligence, the understanding of this truth is the remedy for any sense of disillusionment regarding people. In place of old sentimental, emotional illusions, the student of Christian Science finds satisfaction in Principle and its idea, which is the reality of man in the divine likeness.

The remedy for disillusion, then, is not mere human sympathy for the vices, the sordid indecisions, and the pettinesses of people, but discernment of how the divine Mind is ceaselessly manifesting itself as infinite variety of spiritual perfection, in spite of such human illusions. Truth understood and practiced ameliorates the illusion of mortality, with its belief in the necessity for frailties, by replacing it with the spiritual fact. Through divine metaphysics as revealed in Christian Science one can experience the right and permanent solace for the disillusionment which, following the war, has insinuated itself into the thought of people everywhere in a multitude of ways. Each one who demonstrates divine Principle in his living is enjoying the reality in place of the old illusions.

It is interesting to see how such a literary critic as Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer catches a glimpse of the remedy for disillusionment, and yet interprets it strictly from his own literary point of view. In his "Thus To Revisit" he writes: "And who will deny that to-day the republic groans in all its members? Indeed, despair can seldom have been so general in a state not immediately menaced by fire, famine, pestilence, or strife in arms!" By "republic" he means, of course, not any one nation but the whole body politic of the world, if it may be put in that way. Then he goes on to give his interpretation of the remedy. "So there reawakened in the writer the passionate belief that creative literature—poetry—is the sole panacea for the ills of harassed humanity—the sole alleviator, the only healing unguent. For creative literature is the only thing that can explain to man the nature of his fellow men; and a great, really popular art, founded on and expressive of a whole people, is the sole witness of the nonbarbarity of a race. But to do and to be this, an art must be an exact, not an intoxicated, occupation, and artists must be selfless. In writers that exactness of vision and that selflessness have been things of slow growth—but they have grown, however slowly."

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