Editorial October 27, 1934 Issue

Overcoming Racial Traits

W. STUART BOOTH

THAT which mainly differentiates races and peoples is not so much their physical characteristics as their mental habits, traits, and tendencies. Indeed, the latter control and determine the physical conditions, although this fact is not yet generally recognized. Left to the development of human belief personal, racial, and nationalistic traits have assumed incongruous and humanly incomprehensible forms. We may see in some people loyalty and dishonesty expressed; in others charity and greed; in still others light-heartedness and combativeness. Various peoples are characterized as quiet but stubborn, sagacious but suspicious, selfish and unreliable, obtrusive and aggressive, and so on through the entire gamut of mortal mind tendencies.

Due to the generally accepted belief in hereditary strain and influence, these personal, racial, and national characteristics affect adversely and even mold the experiences of individuals more than they realize. Because self-justification seems to be inherent in human nature these characteristics are condoned and even contended for, although whatever tends to discord and disruption should be condemned and combated as undesirable and unnecessary. Here Christian Science is the panacea, for it exposes the error and points the way to eliminate it with the truth. This Science is the law of God which Christ Jesus understood and demonstrated in overcoming evil with good, fear and hatred with Love, discord and disease with divine Principle, and death with Life.

Our Master struck at the root of personal, racial, and nationalistic bondage when he said, "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven." Evidently he saw clearly that the belief that matter is creative and conscious is a procurer of discord because it presumes and promulgates the assumption that man is separated from God, good, in his nature and being. Jesus not only referred to God as his Father and our Father, but, as is recorded in the seventeenth chapter of John's Gospel, he declared his unity with God and prayed that his followers might realize that they also are at one with God and His Christ. Naturally man's unity with God, who is Mind, Principle, Love, Soul, involves his inseparability from reflection or expression of intelligence, harmony, health, justice, mercy, tenderness, spiritual consciousness.

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