The overturning force of Principle cannot be stayed in the physical universe. The leaven of Truth is perpetually at work. And though men, in their material blindness, may misconstrue the signs of the times, the metaphysician makes no mistake about them. To the idealist the great war was to be the entrance chamber to a new heaven and a new earth. But this heaven and this earth, though he realized it not, were to be equally of the earth earthy. The hopes of the world were to find their expression, after the terrors and agonies of the battle field, in a peace whose symbol was to be ease in matter. The chief baker and the chief butler were to lie down together, and the senses were to lead them. The human mind did not, of course, put it so crudely as that; the human mind never does. All the same it was what it meant. The to-morrow of "Jack Johnsons" and "Big Berthas" was to be a tomorrow of lotus leaves.

There is, however, an ancient proverb, a proverb which, if Master William Langland is correct, we owe as usual to the Greeks, and of them to Plato, to the effect that man proposes, but God disposes. What Plato, or whoever coined the expression, really meant was obviously that men play with material effects, with a vanity which has not yet even discovered that the word itself means nothingness, and remain all unconscious that the only real power is the spiritual causation underlying everything. It was this causation which, overturning and overturning human vanities, brought about the great war. It was this causation, still overturning and overturning, which brought about the great peace—a peace which is only war under a new name. For, just as Jesus the Christ told men of the first century, "I [the Christ, Truth] came not to send peace, but a sword," so, the metaphysician of the twentieth century is able to realize that the more Truth displaces the lie of the human mind the more furiously must rage the chemicalization to which Mrs. Eddy refers on page 401 of Science and Health, when she writes, "What I term Chemicalization is the upheaval produced when immortal Truth is destroying erroneous mortal belief."

The great war stirred the depths of human nature. It brought to the surface all that was at once best and worst in it. And when the war was over this best and worst could no more lie down together than the lion and the lamb. Prohibition was found fighting with appetite, suffrage with sex domination, class equality with class discrimination, and everywhere purity with impurity, and selfishness with selflessness. It was a new phase, that was all, of the old struggle between good and evil, of Merodach with Tiamat, as the pagan ages pictured it, which in Christian theology was symbolized as the battle of Michael with the dragon. "The determination," as Mrs. Eddy writes on page 28 of Science and Health, "to hold Spirit in the grasp of matter is the persecutor of Truth and Love."

The new heaven and the new earth, then, which every human being brought out of his sense of the great war, was a heaven and an earth of dense materiality, or of such dissipated materiality as the vision of the Christ had engendered in his individual case. It is to this materiality that is owing the great wave of disappointment which has threatened to submerge the world in a new era of strife, in which the conflicting forces shall be no longer political but social, whilst the weapons are being forged less in the arsenals than in the forums and in the study. Adam, as Origen pointed out centuries ago, being Adam, in other words human nature being what it is, this disappointment was almost inevitable. The strained hopes with which those who had spent months of privation and misery in the trenches came home to face a world which had exploded in patriotic sentiment during the war, without lessening its own materiality, were bound to breed disenchantment. There was a willingness, it is true, to do something for the soldiers, but it was a willingness, Adam being Adam, which was to be exhausted generally at the expense of somebody else, and the intensity of which faded as the weeks passed by. Added to this there was perhaps an extravagance of expectation upon the part of the soldier, not in the least remarkable, Adam being Adam, which tended to exalt his claims above those of any one else, as if no one else had done anything toward the great achievement.

Thus the feeling of disappointment began slowly to filter through all sorts and conditions of men, because only here and there was there one who was realizing that earth can never repay human suffering, and that every hope of permanent material happiness is built on an illusion. The wise man knows perfectly well that the great danger comes to him when all men speak well of him, and, in the same way, if there had been a greater perception of the Christ, Truth, in the world, the expectations of a new heaven and a new earth would have been built less on a hope of ease in matter, after the war, than on a realization of the fact that the war itself was rather an opportunity for proving the nothingness of matter than an acid test of human endurance to be rewarded with an aftermath of material rest and pleasure.

This surely is the Holy War, the war in which Michael fights against the dragon, in which spiritual strength closes with the material senses, and this is the real Armageddon. The new heaven and the new earth will be found not in the concerted rush of the crowd, but, individually, as each cross-bearer finds his way unemotionally and scientifically along the narrow way in the footsteps of the Christ. The clue to this new earth is no material Theseus thread; it is what the New Testament calls ɵiyrwõìs a scientific knowledge of God, Principle. This knowledge constitutes a realization of the nothingness of matter, and a perception of the fact that material phenomena are a succession of mental concepts, as Mrs. Eddy explains when she writes on page 123 of Science and Health, "Divine Science, rising above physical theories, excludes matter, resolves things into thoughts, and replaces the objects of material sense with spiritual ideas." Everything that exists exists as thought, and this, on a material plane, has been the teaching of all idealistic philosophy, from Plato to Lord Kelvin.

Mrs. Eddy went further than this philosophy in going to Jesus of Nazareth for her Science, and accepting the fundamental difference drawn by him, for Nicodemus, between the Spirit and the flesh. Not only did she insist with the idealistic schools that matter was a phenomenon, but she insisted on the great fact of the idealism of Jesus, that the noumenon of mortal mind or energy was itself a mere illusion, a counterfeit of the divine Mind, God, Principle. "The kingdom of God," Jesus himself declared, "is within you." The realization of this is the scientific knowledge of God, Principle. It is man's citizenship of the new earth, a world of a gathering spiritual understanding of the nothingness of matter, which must inevitably give place to man's citizenship of the new heaven, a heaven not of clouds and mystery, but of spiritual harmony, the government of divine Mind.

Frederick Dixon.