Editorial May 1, 1948 Issue

LET US NOT BE SLAVES!

John Randall Dunn

Christian Science is the evangel of freedom. Its precepts breathe freedom. Its students rejoice in an ever-increasing measure of freedom, for they see in its teachings the fulfillment of Paul's prophecy (Rom. 8:21), "The creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." The Christian Scientist, therefore, has declared war against every material belief, indulgence, and practice which bears the hallmark of bondage to matter.

In the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," that great nineteenth-century exponent of freedom, Mary Baker Eddy, writes (p. 227): "Slavery is not the legitimate state of man. God made man free. Paul said, 'I was free born.' All men should be free. 'Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.' Love and Truth make free, but evil and error lead into captivity."

What a joyous message is this to those who, in the Psalmist's words, "sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, being bound in affliction and iron" (Ps. 107:10); and what mortal, battling with some form of painful wretchedness, does not hail the prospect of deliverance, of healing? But when the problem is not one of physical discomfort, but is nevertheless holding one in bondage to the sensations of a material body, we do not find the same eagerness for freedom. And why? Does not the mind of mortals whisper that painful, but not pleasurable sensations of physicality are all which need to be refuted and turned from?

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