Article July 11, 1964 Issue

Man's Inalienable Rights

[The following is substantially the text of the Christian Science program presented on Sunday, July 5, over the Columbia Broadcasting System "Church of the Air." The speaker was Harry S. Smith.]

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are set forth in the Declaration of Independence as inalienable rights with which each of us is endowed by his creator. They have been accepted as basic to our way of life. This means that we have the right to be free from oppression, dictatorship, and slavery. It means that the dignity of the individual must be respected and his right to happiness and peace maintained and protected. These are the essential human rights which belong to everybody under a free government. They are rights which all men should have and for which all men are seeking.

However, even where these human rights are granted, mankind generally are still in bondage to other forms of tyranny from which they struggle for release. For some, it is the oppression of fear, disease, suffering. For others, it is poverty and hunger. The slavery of false appetites and desires still grips many who would be free. The sense of peace and security we all yearn for is threatened by fear of war and nuclear destruction. Someone may ask, But is it realistic to expect freedom from all these? Yes, it is. It is man's God-given right to find complete liberation from all bondage. But this liberation does not come through mere human effort or human laws. It comes through our understanding the law of God, the law of good, and then yielding to it, conforming our lives to it. Then we can claim and receive in fuller measure our rights of true health, security, abundance, and happiness.

Much of the bondage that mankind endure today comes because they have accepted as law the prevailing mortal belief that God actually created man subject to the enslaving afflictions of disease, lack, hunger, poverty, and that man as a limited, helpless mortal cannot escape these afflictions. Many still believe in all sincerity that God sends sickness, pain, and disease and that it is God's will that man should suffer.

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