Is it Right, or Wrong

Faithfulness to one's highest light is a necessary condition of growth.

No matter how commonplace may seem the situation, or how trivial the occasion, there is a right and perfect way of meeting it, and loyalty to this right way is a far more potent factor in one's development than is indicated by the apparent results.

We are too prone to justify ourselves with "Oh well, it's a very small thing, and it makes little difference which way I go, I'm only one," when really the question of right or wrong is involved. True I am only one, and my being right or wrong may seem to make no difference to the great on-sweeping current of a popular error, but it does make a great difference to me whether I'm right or wrong, be it ever so little, and it does influence others far more than we usually admit.

To illustrate: one bird removed from one bonnet with a hand impelled by thoughtful tenderness, and the determination that vanity and cruelty shall not overrule mercy and humanity, may seem insignificant, but it is the result of a regenerating thought, and no one can estimate its influence.

A Christian Scientist has no right and no desire to interfere with another's demonstration, but when wrong is being perpetrated through ignorance of existing conditions, is it right to be silent? A gentle, loving woman who has enlisted to lessen suffering and sin cannot but recoil from encouraging the atrocities committed in the slaughter of birds, however, exquisite may be the personal decorations so secured. But really, disregarding the cruelty of tearing the wings from the live birds that the plumage may retain its brilliance; disregarding the thousands of nestlings left to starve, disregarding the sad silence of our groves as the thrushes, the blue-birds, the orioles, and the mockingbirds disappear one by one under this heedless craze fashion, how inconsistent and inharmonious is the effort to enhance the expression of youth and beauty with the spoils of cruelty and death.

This barbarous habit of decoration which involves the sacrifice of life might better be tolerated in savagery, where the genius of manufacture; and the consideration of sentiment are undeveloped; but for us the flower artist has caught the whole range of hue and color from the first tinted suggestions of spring's mayflower, to the rich colorings of summer's nasturtiums, and if we find ourselves still unsatisfied, we may well wonder whither this tide of fashion would bear us.

It is after all not so small a thing that "five million song birds are annually required to supply the demands for the ornamentation of the hats of American women, that in one month one million bobolinks were killed near Philadelphia, and that seventy thousand song birds were supplied from a single Long Island village to New York dealers for millinery purposes." Mr. A. J. C. Norris, in a terse little article on "Christianity and Millinery" (ornithologist's report), says: "It is difficult to harmonize Christianity and cruelty; they are not consistent ... How many beautiful women enter the churches every Sunday and bow their heads in prayer to the Father of all, while their bonnets testify how little they protect and love His little ones."

The illustration expands itself into a matter that concerns the common weal, and we feel sure that it cannot be indifference that lends encouragement to this unholy traffic; it must be simply ignorance. But ignorance is not excusable when so many have already awaked to the enormity of the butchery involved, and are telling the public the results of their investigation. Their statistics are reliable and available, and ignorance is therefore no excuse.

This wearing of the plumage of slaughtered birds is but one of the myriad "little things" that are great because of the right or wrong involved. They link themselves inseparably to our spiritual growth, since only as love and harmony and loyalty govern the homeliest, the most insignificant, details of living, do we demonstrate our scientific relation to the one Love, the one Life. Our ascent is always from the summit of our highest understanding.

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