Article June 3, 1939 Issue

"Who is thine enemy?"

[Written Especially for Young People]

AILEEN E. WAVRO

Ralph had made the high school basketball team. He was very proud of this accomplishment, despite the fact that there were several other boys who felt they should have received the appointment.

In returning from a game one evening, in which he had played an important part, Ralph was pushed from the step of the streetcar, and in falling, his ankle turned under him. It seemed impossible to stand on the foot, so he hobbled over to the curb and sat down.

The boy knew who had pushed him from the step, but as he sat there thinking about it, he suddenly recalled the lesson of the previous Sunday at the Christian Science Sunday School. His teacher had spent almost the entire period explaining and stressing the importance of impersonalizing evil, of separating evil from the person, and then knowing and declaring its nothingness. She had told the pupils that evil has no power of its own, and that we ourselves give evil the only power it seems to have by attaching it to some personality. This had seemed rather difficult to understand at the time, but now, as he sat there on the curb, Ralph saw very clearly what his teacher had meant. He had done just that; he had attached jealousy and envy to two of the boys, thus giving power to these evils to push him around. "Why, it wasn't those two boys who pushed me from the step at all," he reasoned; "it was jealousy and envy! And what are they? Error. Nothing, absolutely nothing! And if nothing pushed me off the step, I guess I wasn't pushed!" So interested did he become at this point in his reasoning that he jumped up and had taken five or six steps before he realized that he was walking with no discomfort whatsoever.

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