Editorial March 4, 1944 Issue

Believe Not in Luck or Fate!

John Randall Dunn

The average individual will, without doubt, scorn the intimation that he is superstitious; in fact, he will heartily subscribe to Ben Jonson's epigram. "Better be dumb than superstitious." And yet, how subtly may one superstition or another enter and influence the thinking of unwary mortals! Listen to your fellows as they go about their daily tasks, and how often do you hear such statements as these: "Good luck to you!" "Well, you surely have had a run of bad luck!" or, sometimes from the lips of soldiers, sailors, or airmen, "The bullet didn't have my name on it—yet." And what volumes may be read into that "yet"! If the reader of these lines has never looked up in an unabridged dictionary the word "superstition" he has missed some extraordinary enlightenment. In the first place, the word originally carried the meaning of soothsaying; then hear Webster's opening statement: "An irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God, proceeding from ignorance, unreasoning fear... a belief in magic or chance, or the like."

Now the truths taught in Christian Science instantly lift the truth-seeker from the plane of chance, luck, fate, and their unlovely etceteras, to the realm of scientific, provable realism. Is there any mysticism in connection with the multiplication table? Only to him who has not proved its unvarying rule. Does a student, failing to arrive at the correct answer to a problem in arithmetic, complain that luck is against him, and fate has inexorably decreed that he is headed for mathematical disaster? Unthinkable, of course, would be such empty reasoning. As with the law of mathematics, so with the actual law of man's being, does chance or fate find no abiding place. Says the sagacious Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Shallow men believe in luck.... Strong men believe in cause and effect." Hear these heartening, strengthening words, with which Mary Baker Eddy posits the Christian Scientist's platform (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 313): "Jesus of Nazareth was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe. He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause." Then a little farther on she adds (p. 314), "Our Master gained the solution of being, demonstrating the existence of but one Mind without a second or equal."

Starting from the premise that God is Mind, infinite intelligence, which is the changeless divine Principle, Love, the student first of all begins to lose an ignorant, superstitious sense of Deity. No longer does he approach in prayer an unknown God, who may or may not see fit to send good and blessing to His children. Who of those whose early rearing was under the tutelage of scholastic theology, does not recall the sinking of the heart when a prayer for the sick ended thus: "If it be not Thy will that Thy servant should know health, take him to Thy heavenly home." Of course, from one standpoint, this was an adroit petition to offer, since, whatever happened, one might say the prayer was answered; but it is extremely doubtful if such prayer awakened much faith, hope, or courage in the heart of the sufferer.

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