Editorial March 23, 1912 Issue

WHO SHALL BE FIRST?

John B. Willis

Much is being said today, in all the field of liberal thought, respecting the awakening to and assertion of selfhood. Descartes' fundamental proposition, "I think: therefore I am," is on many lips, and not only in religious writings, but in fiction and in the drama, a new emphasis is being laid upon the possibility and significance of a will to think and to be. This tendency of thought attaches great value to the study of psychology, an analysis of the human mentality which usually leads to the classification of a higher and a lower, an inner and an outer, a conscious and an unconscious self; and Stevenson simply gave striking embodiment to this trend in his familiar story of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

So world-wide and so marked is this drift that human sense may be said to have undergone nothing less than a revolution. Many look upon the result as expressive of advance, and it has undoubtedly had to do with the present revolt against the dogmatism of scholastic theology. It may have thus brought to some a larger sense of freedom and thereby opened the way for an improved belief, an escape from listless conformity. Nevertheless, no thoughtful student of this mental movement can have failed to see that as a whole its exaltation of the power of the human mind, its exploitation of selfhood, has not conduced to an increase of reverence, of humility, or of spiritual aspiration. The new powers which are said to have been gained have not been identified as of God, either in their phrasing or their phenomena, but rather as of "gray matter." The dominating I is not divine, but distinctly human, hence not infrequently "puffed up."

In this same era Christian Science has come, and it too has had much to say about selfhood or individuality; likewise much of the power of Mind, but the Ego it has honored and advanced in human thought is not mortalmindedness, but its antipode, spiritual perception. All men think of Christ Jesus as supremely efficient, and yet he said, "I can of mine own self do nothing." He knew but one Mind; and while recognizing with him the claim of a material personality and power, Christian Science lifts the thought of selfhood into at-one-ment with God, a fact which gives unmeasured dignity and value to it as a religious teaching. In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy writes, "The belief that man has existence or mind separate from God is a dying error;" "Through discernment of the spiritual opposite of materiality, even the way through Christ, Truth, man will ... find himself unfallen, upright, pure, and free" (pp. 42, 171). This is her impressive and inspiring reply to that exaltation of the human which forgets the divine.

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