Editorial October 28, 1944 Issue

A Fresh Outlook

Margaret Morrison

IN a world weary with war, burdened with taxation, confused with conflicting or corrupt political policies—its difficulties often met with indifference or indignation—seeking within itself a way out of its self-imposed ills, in such a seeming world where shall we turn for a fresh outlook on events and find a remedy for its apparent ills? On page 269 of "Miscellaneous Writings" Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, says, "Lives there a man who can better define ethics, better elucidate the Principle of being, than he who 'spake as never man spake,' and whose precepts and example have a perpetual freshness in relation to human events?" Here is found the way of "perpetual freshness" of outlook on world affairs, even in the "precepts and example" of Christ Jesus, the great Exemplar of perfect law and Life.

While Christendom has advanced along moral and ethical lines, it has lost, to a large degree, the pure spiritual basis on which Jesus defined ethics and proved the Principle of being, and so it has lost its ability to give the signs required by the master Christian of his followers. The purest of morals and the most meticulous of ethics, while required, are not enough to demonstrate the allness of God and the consequent unreality of all that is unlike Him, and to give a freshness in our relation to human events. Jesus said, "For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he." May this not mean that the least spiritual idea emanating from Mind, God, has more might than any sense of human goodness, however great? Unless spiritually enlightened, a human sense of goodness rests on duality, the belief in both a good and an evil power, Spirit and matter. Frequently the greater the human sense of goodness the more easily it becomes the victim of its own belief in evil.

When honesty is mixed with a belief in dishonesty, the position of the honest one is weakened and he becomes the victim, not of dishonesty, which is nonexistent in God, good, but of his own idolatrous belief in dishonesty. His ethics must reach the point of rendering "to God the things that are God's" as well as "to Caesar the things that are Caesar's." That is, he must render unto God His idea, man, and know man as being incapable of dishonesty, reflecting at all times the government of God. Thus one is enabled intelligently to deny reality to dishonesty and see its claim dissolve before the irresistible power of Truth.

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