Editorial February 4, 1922 Issue

Turning to the Gentiles

Frederick Dixon

There is nothing the human mind so much enjoys as continuing in a rut. The reason is simple. It requires energy to get out of a rut, and energy is what the human mind is essentially lacking in. Real energy is a manifestation of Spirit, whilst the condition of the human mind is necessarily one of sensuality. It was just this idea that the writer of Genesis was endeavoring to bring out when he said of the serpent, or personified materiality, "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." Mrs. Eddy, in one of those flashes of inspiration which illuminate the spiritual meaning of the Bible all through her writings, makes the meaning of this more than clear in her comment on the passage, on page 534 of Science and Health: "This prophecy has been fulfilled. The Son of the Virgin-mother unfolded the remedy for Adam, or error; and the Apostle Paul explains this warfare between the idea of divine power, which Jesus presented, and mythological material intelligence called energy and opposed to Spirit."

The whole of history bears out Mrs. Eddy's explanation. From the time of the earliest records down to the records of to-day, it is a history of human drifting. Here and there a stronger swimmer reaches out from the drifters, but the drifters, as a rule, immediately bend their so-called energies to overwhelming him. They have one common objurgation: Why art thou come hither to disturb us before our time? The whole history of Christian Church, to take a single example, is the history of reformer following reformer, for the most part without any considerable success. Stephen Harding, Francis of Assisi, Wycliffe, what thanks or what support did they get for their efforts? Luther and Knox did meet with a larger measure of success, but their followers promptly passed in turn into the rut, so that the whole history of religion becomes the history of the persecuted turned persecutor.

The greatest example, however, of this effort to make humanity think, to make it test its opinions by something more than a mere repetition of shibboleths, is seen in the missionary journey of Paul and Barnabas, when, at Antioch, they found the inability of prevailing over the latent animosity and hidebound formalism of the synagogue, and turned to the Gentiles. Christ Jesus had fought the ceremonial religion of Judea from Dan to Beersheba. But his spirituality made hardly a dent on the animality of Judea. That was partially what the writer of the fourth gospel had in mind when he said, "He came unto his own, and his own received him not." If there lived a people on the face of the planet, in the first century, who should have lived up to the preaching of the Christ, it was the people who described themselves as the chosen people, the people who had had such infinite proofs of the protection of Principle. But the life had gone out of Judaism. So when the Christ was preached, the Jews knew it not. Not only did they not know it, they rebelled against it; not so much because it was contrary to the teachings of the hierarchy, as because it demanded the very thing the hierarchy most feared, and that was the substitution of acts for words. Therefore it was that, on that day in Antioch, "when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with envy, and spake against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming. Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles."

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