The bulldozer—a steel blade pushed by a tractor—is named in a recent article in the magazine Fortune as the inanimate hero of the present war. The reason is that it is the machine which moves dirt, uproots obstructions, blazes trails, builds roads, and does many other useful things faster and often better than men have been able to do them before. "The pace of this war," says the article, "has hung upon the speed with which the earth has been moved." A foreigner observing the rapidity with which our forces, using bulldozers and other equipment, built roads, commented, "You have no idea how the Yanks make roads; they lay the concrete down like toothpaste."

Trails, roads, and highways, in their successive development, have for centuries been indicative of the desire of men to facilitate travel and communication. The Indians used, and added to, the trails made by animals of the wild. White men. with their wagons, widened and improved these trails into roads, and now have come the hard-surfaced highways for motor travel. As human thought loses more of its limitations and discovers more of its capacities, safer, more rapid, and more comfortable transport will appear.

But merely to facilitate transportation of physical bodies and things will of itself add little to human progress. There must be found and used by individuals and nations the highways of intelligent, righteous thought which provide the way out of the wilderness of material failures, over the morass of doubts and the mountains of fear, to the goal of reality—the kingdom of Life, harmony, and peace, where God's law is sovereign and Love's will supreme.

Isaiah recognized the value of highways and foretold the demand of God and His Christ, crying to men in the wilderness of materiality, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God." Men have learned how, with machinery and ingenuity, to make straight highways in the desert, to fill in the low, and level down the high, to straighten the crooked, and make smooth the rough places.

Now the leaders of the United Nations, and right-minded men and women everywhere, are confronted with the necessity of making in the wilderness of world thought, of cynicism, conflicting racial and national interests, suspicion, rivalries, and self-interest, a highway—a way of understanding and right purpose—by which the march of human progress may go forward to the rule of right and the enjoyment of resulting peace.

Even in well-ordered families differences of opinions, sometimes mild and sometimes acute, occur. Yet mutual respect and good will prevent their members from disrupting the family relationship. Let us apply the same reasonableness and sense of values to the family of nations. If we and our allies do not always see eye to eye on the course of action in difficult human situations, should we endanger the attaining of our great common objectives by admitting to our consciousness the disrupting thoughts of self-righteousness, self-love, and suspicion? President Roosevelt, in a recent message to Congress, properly reminds all that "nations, like individuals, do not always see alike or think alike, and international co-operation and progress are not helped by any nation assuming that it has a monoply of wisdom or of virtue." Who would have his nation be a Pharisee?

There are many valleys of thought to be exalted, many mountainous problems to be overcome and laid low, many crooked ways of thinking in individuals and nations—all of them—to be made straight, and many rough places of friction to be made smooth. But impetuous criticism of the other fellow or nation never helps to accomplish this at home or abroad.

Christian Science shows each of us how to think so as to aid mightily our own and all nations to see the wise ways in which to build in the wilderness of human thought the highway that is free to all men for attaining sure progress toward a more united world and a lasting peace. The Christian Scientist has learned that God is universal Principle, the one Mind, the only real substance. All men belong, primarily and permanently, to the one deific Mind, which they really live to express. The burlesque of material existence with its material-mindedness. self-will, strife, hatred, fear, affliction, and death, is not reality, but the one evil misconception of creation and man, which can be overcome and displaced only by the true idea of God and man, the eternal Christ—the Truth that bases the highway of thought which leads to a better world.

Men and nations are trying earnestly to find the way to thwart the evil and enthrone the good. Hampered by age-old antagonisms, and by distrust born of fear, their better sense still feels there is a way to thwart destructive evil and to live together in understanding and unity. This inherent hope in men Christian Science nurtures and shows how to attain. Says Mary Baker Eddy, "The exterminator of error is the great truth that God, good, is the only Mind, and that the supposititious opposite of infinite Mind—called devil or evil—is not Mind, is not Truth, but error, without intelligence or reality" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 469).

Let us know that this is the fact, and that every nation, race, and individual is subordinate to the control of this one all-intelligent Mind. Let us know that the laws of Mind, the forces of intelligence, are daily and hourly available and working through right ideas to make straight in the desert of human hopes the highway of the living God, even the Christ-way, which leads human thought, individually and collectively, out of its wilderness of disunity and distrust to realize the ever-presence of Love's kingdom, discernible through spiritual sense, wherein the unity of good, the allness of God, embraces all men in God's reign of enduring peace.

Paul Stark Seeley