The thought of the world is occupied to a great extent with the news from the distant combat areas. Men of good will, irrespective of race and creed, are praying and working for the protection of the men in uniform fighting the good fight for freedom.

But the news from the home fronts of our own country and those of our allies tells of the casualties sustained by men and women who are laboring to supply the armed forces with materials and weapons. The figures soar despite the efforts of industrial experts to reduce them. Do not these men and women on the home front need our prayers and our thoughtful support?

Many Christian Scientists are doing unaccustomed work in the war industries. The noise, the confusion, the risk are not always easy to nullify in consciousness. It requires sustained effort while at work, and often the help of consecrated practitioners on the outside. It has been the writer's experience that with such effort and with such help one can remain relatively free from fatigue, improve the quality of one's work, and be protected from the fear of accident and occupational disease. Even in the event of accident, the sure remedy of the all-presence and all-power of God, which Christian Science offers, is at hand, and healing is assured with less than ordinary delay, often, indeed, instantaneously.

"Trials are proofs of God's care," writes Mary Baker Eddy in the Christian Science textbook. "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p.66). Is war not one of the supreme trials? Through the overcoming of its hazards thousands upon thousands are learning to know that God is near at hand to those who seek Him. How is He revealing His nearness to them? Why through intelligence, that activity of thought which is the attribute of man in God's image, when God is understood as all-knowing, all-seeing, ever-present, all-powerful Mind, infinite good.

"Christian Science translates Mind, God to mortals." writes our Leader, on page 22 of "Miscellaneous Writings." And she continues. "It is the infinite calculus defining the line, plane, space, and fourth dimension of Spirit."

The beliefs of breadth and length and depth circumscribe all human experience. They claim to restrain us in the exercise of the truth which frees—the truth that man is spiritual, forever coexisting with Spirit and living in Spirit's universe.

Jesus acknowledged no human limitation as valid. He made his way unseen through the crowd. He walked through closed doors to join his friends. He emerged from the tomb. The works he did, he has promised that we may also do. If we do not yet measure up to the full demonstration of matter's nothingness, we may surely know that it cannot limit us that it cannot injure us that its concreteness disappears in the proportion that we understand the reality of Spirit, the limitlessness of Mind.

We may know that the divine Mind is operative in all mankind's affairs. "Immortal Mind, governing all, must be acknowledged as supreme in the physical realm, so-called, as well as in the spiritual" (Science and Health, p. 427). The understanding of God's control protects transports on the sea on earth, and in the sky. It protects each individual soldier and sailor who mans them. The spiritual fact is that man, God-governed, reflects unerring intelligence.

This intelligence, too, governs the operation of the machine, be it drill, rivet gun, turbine, or airplane engine. To know this protects the individual in the factory from risk as surely as it does the pilot of the plane or the soldier at the front. Anyone motivated and governed by an understanding of man's oneness with God, by an awareness of his place in a God-directed universe, will weather the storm, will guard himself and those upon whom his uplifted thought rests. He is immune, if his motives be right, from contagion, occupational disease, epidemic. It is gratifying to have proved that we cannot utter, or even think, the great truths of existence—man's unity with God, his eternality—without being more and more free from the so-called laws of physics, the fear of accident, disease, and death.

If all of us will strive to reflect more of the divine intelligence belonging to infinite Love, we can help to resolve justly the problems which now torment mankind—political jealousy and dissension, race antagonisms, selfish interests. The cause of civilization for which the United Nations fight is, we know, nearer right than the avowed aims of our self-appointed enemies.

Let us go forward to victory. And meanwhile let us support with our prayers the men who lead, the men who fight, and the men and women who work in this righteous cause.