Article March 31, 1945 Issue

We Can Help the Children

AMELIA ELIZABETH WALDEN

The average person accepts the traditional belief that man passes through a period of development called childhood. Often, this brief interlude is looked upon as a winsome period of carefree dependence upon more experienced adults. Feeling that some of the charm of existence disappears with maturity, many adults look back yearningly upon their own childhood. Who has not heard at least one commencement address in which the speaker, with a note of nostalgia in his voice, informs his youthful audience: "These are the best years of your life. Make the most of them"?

More recently the pendulum of opinion has swung to the opposite extreme. Children of many countries have endured hardships which humanity would gladly have spared them. In the United States, however, the problem has assumed a somewhat different form. Here, many young people have lacked proper supervision in the home, acquired a wrong sense of values because of the demand for their assistance in factories and other places of employment, and come face to face with the mesmeric suggestion that moral codes may be forgotten for the present. Consequently, our young people at home have sometimes made the headlines alongside international events. The newspaper reports would have us believe that youth has suddenly torn away from all control and become rowdy and lawbreaking.

The Christian Scientist knows, of course, that neither the sentimental nor the cataclysmic viewpoint is scientifically accurate. Examining current conditions in the light of spiritual understanding, he realizes that what appears to be happening to youth today is simply a phase of the turning and overturning of evil, precedent to its destruction, which is taking place on a world-wide scale. He should not be alarmed by it any more than by any other phase of the dream of material existence. To leave the matter there, however, would be to fail to utilize the scientific power of his religion, which shows him how to eradicate every form of error and to replace it with truth.

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