Article July 10, 1926 Issue

Order

GEORGENE L. MILLER

There is a well-known proverb which states that "order is heaven's first law." Of this statement our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, has written in "Retrospection and Introspection" (p. 87), that it "is so eternally true, so axiomatic, that it has become a truism; and its wisdom is as obvious in religion and scholarship as in astronomy or mathematics."

While we may accept this truism as it relates to the stars in their courses, or when applied to mathematical problems, and may perceive, though faintly, its value as a guide or working rule in human affairs generally, as well as in religion and academics specifically, yet we may be strongly inclined to declare chaos rather than cosmos to be the proper description of the material world outlook to-day. We may wonder at this, may even deplore it; and yet, do we ever ask ourselves what we are doing to maintain true order? If we stop to give this question serious thought, are we not apt to find that many of us are drifting with the current, content, perhaps, to follow all the conventional material ways of expressing order? If our domestic machinery is running smoothly, our office work well systematized, our material affairs models of precision, we may think we are satisfactorily doing our part toward bringing order out of the general chaos. But is this all there is to order? Is this the order that is "heaven's first law"?

When one who has been trained to orderly ways turns to Christian Science, he may keep on with his orderly doing, and perhaps be deceived into thinking that he is actually expressing a scientific sense of order, arguing that orderly doing must originate in orderly thinking. But just as the wizards of Egypt tried to pattern the marvels wrought by Moses, so does the so-called human mind attempt to imitate the divine Mind; and thus it has its concept of order—the order that results from material education. When the student turns the searchlight of Truth upon the situation he is quite apt to discover that his mental house may be anything but orderly. He may even be one of those to incur the rebuke of Spencer: "When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has, the greater will be his confusion of thought." The student then awakes to the fact that if orderly doing is desirable and commendable, how much more valuable must be orderly thinking! Said Jesus, "These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone."

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

Asserting Our Citizenship