There is nothing the human mind so much enjoys as continuing in a rut. The reason is simple. It requires energy to get out of a rut, and energy is what the human mind is essentially lacking in. Real energy is a manifestation of Spirit, whilst the condition of the human mind is necessarily one of sensuality. It was just this idea that the writer of Genesis was endeavoring to bring out when he said of the serpent, or personified materiality, "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." Mrs. Eddy, in one of those flashes of inspiration which illuminate the spiritual meaning of the Bible all through her writings, makes the meaning of this more than clear in her comment on the passage, on page 534 of Science and Health: "This prophecy has been fulfilled. The Son of the Virgin-mother unfolded the remedy for Adam, or error; and the Apostle Paul explains this warfare between the idea of divine power, which Jesus presented, and mythological material intelligence called energy and opposed to Spirit."

The whole of history bears out Mrs. Eddy's explanation. From the time of the earliest records down to the records of to-day, it is a history of human drifting. Here and there a stronger swimmer reaches out from the drifters, but the drifters, as a rule, immediately bend their so-called energies to overwhelming him. They have one common objurgation: Why art thou come hither to disturb us before our time? The whole history of Christian Church, to take a single example, is the history of reformer following reformer, for the most part without any considerable success. Stephen Harding, Francis of Assisi, Wycliffe, what thanks or what support did they get for their efforts? Luther and Knox did meet with a larger measure of success, but their followers promptly passed in turn into the rut, so that the whole history of religion becomes the history of the persecuted turned persecutor.

The greatest example, however, of this effort to make humanity think, to make it test its opinions by something more than a mere repetition of shibboleths, is seen in the missionary journey of Paul and Barnabas, when, at Antioch, they found the inability of prevailing over the latent animosity and hidebound formalism of the synagogue, and turned to the Gentiles. Christ Jesus had fought the ceremonial religion of Judea from Dan to Beersheba. But his spirituality made hardly a dent on the animality of Judea. That was partially what the writer of the fourth gospel had in mind when he said, "He came unto his own, and his own received him not." If there lived a people on the face of the planet, in the first century, who should have lived up to the preaching of the Christ, it was the people who described themselves as the chosen people, the people who had had such infinite proofs of the protection of Principle. But the life had gone out of Judaism. So when the Christ was preached, the Jews knew it not. Not only did they not know it, they rebelled against it; not so much because it was contrary to the teachings of the hierarchy, as because it demanded the very thing the hierarchy most feared, and that was the substitution of acts for words. Therefore it was that, on that day in Antioch, "when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with envy, and spake against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming. Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles."

What, then, is this turning to the Gentiles? The Gentile is always the man a foot or a mile outside the zareba of dominant authority. The Gentile may be Og, king of Bashan, or he may be the Samaritan who bound up the wounds of the man who fell amongst thieves, on the occasion when the Levite passed on the other side of the road. In other words, being a Gentile is not necessarily in his favor. What, however, is not in favor of orthodoxy is the calm assurance that everybody outside the pale is an Og rather than a good Samaritan. The pride of orthodoxy, no matter whether the orthodoxy be religious, artistic, or of any other description, is one of the most devastating blights which can settle upon the human consciousness. The Pharisees had it in abundance, with the result that they substituted the phylactery for the Golden Rule. What Christ Jesus thought of the whole tribe may be read in the terrible denunciations recorded in the gospels. The truth is that there is something in the pride of those whom the Scotch call the "unco guid" which closes their ears to all hope of ever knowing better. Whether religious sectarian, painter, or philanthropist, they are all tarred with the same brush. There is no harder man to help in the whole world than the man supremely conscious of his own rectitude.

The Jews of Antioch were typical of the race. They writhed under the demands for spiritual activity thrust upon them by Paul and Barnabas, and yet, though they rejected the new gospel themselves, they were not willing that the Gentiles should accept it. Like all materialists, they were deluged with fear, though they could hardly themselves have explained fear of what. Thus, when the whole city came to hear Paul preach, instead of being willing that others should accept what they had rejected, their passions drove them into open opposition. Having no arguments by which they could meet the preaching of the missionaries, they naturally fell back on slander and persecution. Thus, in the words of the historian, "the Jews stirred up the devout and honourable women, and the chief men of the city, and raised persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them out of their coasts." There is the action of the human mind reflected all down the ages. The expulsion of men's bodies from a religious fold, or a geographical area, is believed to be capable of stopping thought. The fanatics of the medieval ages, who burned the books or bodies of their opponents, were fashioned in exactly the same mold as the Jews of Antioch. They had not enough intelligence to see that the fires which burned Wycliffe's Bibles or the bodies of the martyrs spread the teaching of that Book and the opinions of those men far and wide in a way which never could have been accomplished without this persecution. Fear, ignorance, bigotry, have walked in the same paths ever since. Mrs. Eddy had to encounter precisely the same storm that beat about Paul, about Wycliffe, and about Luther, and all that the storm did was to carry the seeds of Christian Science completely round the world. "The Cause of Christian Science," she writes, on page 143 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany," "is prospering throughout the world and stands forever as an eternal and demonstrable Science, and I do not regard this attack upon me as a trial, for when these things cease to bless they will cease to occur."

What Mrs. Eddy wrote of herself applies to every man before her who bore the torch of Truth, and will apply to every man after her until the human mind is exterminated by the vision of the Christ. But until that day comes there will be Jews and Gentiles, and the reformer will be perpetually driven to appeal from the Jew to the Gentile.

Frederick Dixon.