Editorial October 21, 1944 Issue

"To live and let live"

John Randall Dunn

Can any unbiased student of the writings of Mary Baker Eddy fail to realize that the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science dipped her pen in the inkwell of inspiration? Let just one of her oft-quoted, spiritually illumined statements be considered here: "To live and let live, without clamor for distinction or recognition; to wait on divine Love; to write truth first on the tablet of one's own heart,—this is the sanity and perfection of living, and my human ideal" (Message to The Mother Church for 1902, p. 2). In the vast storehouse of Christian lore, can there be found a sentiment breathing more of the Master's idealism than this? And in a world awakening from the nightmare of war, how welcome should be such a beacon light!

"To live and let live"—here is a maxim to be kept before those who will write the treaties of peace. But can this be interpreted as a plea for clemency, for emotional softness in dealing with wrongdoers? The inexorable law of justice decrees, in the language of Holy Writ, that "the way of transgressors is hard," because "they shall make their own tongue to fall upon themselves."

Mrs. Eddy, in reaffirming the Christian tenet of God as Love, teaches that Love is divine Principle. A poet hints this in the well-known line, "All's love, yet all's law." Now let us suppose that a child in school turns in an examination paper containing an attempted solution of a problem, and asks forgiveness for his failure to arrive at the correct answer. How can he be forgiven? Only by rectifying every mistake in the problem. By turning to fixed mathematical truths, he will be able to detect errors in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In strict obedience to the law of arithmetic lies his only hope of pardon. In dealing with an individual lawbreaker or a nation of malefactors, therefore, we "let live" and truly love only when we serve divine Principle at the watchtower of thought and action, and demand evidence of repentance in a practical rightabout-face of those who through the mesmerism of sense have lost the path of rectitude.

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