Editorial May 3, 1947 Issue

"A merry heart doeth good like a medicine"

John Randall Dunn

What quality of thought is more desirable than geniality? One dictionary defines it in part as "sympathetic cheerfulness; warmth of disposition and manners." Is it not plain that this attribute of Christian love is ever an effective lubricant for the machinery of human work and play? Men and women who face the frictions and vicissitudes of the dream of material existence with sympathetic cheerfulness and warmth of disposition and manners are easy to live with, both for themselves and for others.

Even those who may fancy themselves opposed to the teachings of Christian Science are willing to concede that consistent students of this spiritual doctrine are folk of kindly dispositions and unflagging cheerfulness. In her Message to The Mother Church for 1901 (p. 30) Mary Baker Eddy writes, "Philanthropists, and the higher class of critics in theology and materia medica, recognize that Christian Science kindles the inner genial life of a man, destroying all lower considerations."

Someone may say he longs for this geniality, but knows not how to bridle a quick temper and choleric speech. How does Christian Science deal with such a problem? The answer must invariably be, "Put off the old man with his deeds" and "put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him" (Col. 3:9, 10). In other words. Science teaches mortals to see that whatever is discordant or inharmonious, be it sickness, an unlovely disposition, congenital fear or moroseness, belongs to the old man—to the material, mistaken sense of being. It is therefore to be dealt with as unreality, and not reality. Its vaunted actuality must be challenged and repudiated, because the Scripture says everything that God made is good; and what is good about the opposite of harmony, law, and Love?

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