Editorial June 22, 1940 Issue

Consecration of Energy

Evelyn F. Heywood

"To understand God is the work of eternity, and demands absolute consecration of thought, energy, and desire," writes Mary Baker Eddy on page 3 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." The work which men are called upon to do to bring peace and security to the world demands dauntless energy—not the unbridled energy of physical force, bringing with it terror and destruction; not the mere energy of intellectual knowledge, which, though it be a Titan, carries only the few along with it, and often as adherents rather than participants. The energy that is required is the energy of Soul, exercised in all the grandeur and beauty of inexhaustible power. Christianity can do with nothing less than the full range of this consecrated energy, if it is to accomplish what Christ Jesus demanded of his followers in his virile, explicit orders, in the even more impelling persuasiveness of his radiant and dynamic example.

In consecrated energy, tireless, limitless, because its source and inspiration are of God, men will accomplish everything that is demanded of them in the great task of revivifying and restoring the world to sanity and to confidence. In this unconquerable resolution, they will not only preserve their joy and trust in good, however violent and prolonged the assaults of evil, but they will seek in love and patience to arouse the same eager willingness of cooperation in others; to kindle in the careless, the disillusioned, and the cynical a recognition of those boundless spiritual forces which all are called upon to wield on behalf of humanity.

In the third chapter of Revelation we read: "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth." This rebuke, if hearkened to and understood, must be a spur to every laggard thought of cowardice or compromise with evil. Security to the individual and the race is never to be found in lukewarmness of interest and effort. The lives of men, if they are to accomplish that which is demanded of them by Soul, must give evidence of an inexhaustible vigor, an eager, spontaneous championship of all that is right; a relentless, intrepid warfare against all that is evil.

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