The two words "conservative" and "liberal" are becoming increasingly important in denoting the difference in viewpoint among the peoples of the earth on matters political and religious. The Oxford Dictionary defines "conservative" as meaning "disposed to maintain existing institutions...cautious." "Liberal" it defines as "favourable to democratic reforms and abolition of privilege...open-minded."

Human history abounds in examples of these different viewpoints. Tyndale was strangled, then burned at the stake, by conservatives who insisted that the Bible should not be read by the common people because it had not been in the past. He was willing to sacrifice himself to further the more general distribution of God's Word. Huss, Luther, and Calvin rebelled against "existing institutions," and opened the door to a new religious era in the Reformation. The Barons at Runnymede were the liberals of their time, forcing concessions in law and government from their unwilling and conservative king.

Conservatism serves a high purpose when it defends orderly methods of government—for example, the Constitution of the United States or the Manual of The Mother Church—against fanatical liberalism, which would sometimes tear down what has been tried and proved worthy, without providing aught that gives assurance of being an expression of wisely defined progress.

Self-interest often breeds fear of change and clings to things as they are lest a change may bring a worse lot, unmindful of the fact that God's law demands constant progress and will turn and overturn "until he come whose right it is" (Ezek. 21:27)—until the impartial love of God for all men be fully evidenced in daily life.

It is obvious that if all men had always clung to things as they were, we should still be living in caves, hammering with stones, and dressing in skins. But forces are at work which the liberal may recognize and willingly accept, and the conservative oppose or reluctantly yield to. They are the forces of intelligence and enlightenment which preserve and truly conserve from the past all that is good and just, but disengage and throw off what is wrong and deterrent to individual and collective advancement.

Christ Jesus was a true liberal, and a true conservative. He accepted all that was genuine and true in the teachings of the prophets before him, and also he refused all the limitations and encumbrances of dogma, ritual, ecclesiasticism, and man-made doctrinal law that would smother and obscure the spiritual verities on which the steps of human progress depend. To the Pharisees and would-be conservatives, who condemned him because he would destroy what they would perpetuate he said. "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil" (Matt. 5: 17). What enabled him unerringly to evaluate the good that had appeared and to have that openness of thought which made him the truest liberal and greatest contributor to a new and better order of life for mankind, was his understanding of Truth, the Life which is God.

With the Master it was not a question as to what would serve and satisfy the selfish, restricted desires or opinions of men, religiously or politically. His work was to see and proclaim what was God's underlying truth, justice, and law for all men, to bring to light the truth of being, regardless of the effect on established institutions, vested interests, accepted material beliefs, or hard-crystallized opinions.

In our time Mary Baker Eddy, because she found God to be the Mind of man, fearlessly took the same position. She writes, "We soil our garments with conservatism, and afterwards we must wash them clean" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 452). And under the heading "Right views of humanity" (ibid., p. 239) she draws, in these words, a safe pattern for much social and political reform: "Break up cliques, level wealth with honesty, let worth be judged according to wisdom, and we get better views of humanity."

The real issue is between materialism and spirituality, between the belief, and all its resultants, that the so-called material mind is cause, and the fact that Spirit, positive Mind, Principle, is the alone cause. As you and I understand God better, as we reflect divine Love and wisdom more, we shall see and support genuine good wherever and whenever it appears, regardless of its religious or political label. We shall gratefully acknowledge whatever good the human past has bequeathed to the human present, but we shall with wisdom and discrimination differentiate between the preservation of such good and the determination of persons or organizations of persons to resist human progress because a change in the existing order would disturb their plans and self-assumed privileges.

True conservatism and true liberalism are essential to the progress of humanity. But the answer as to what this fact means is found only in the spiritual idea of God and man the Christ-idea of Life, which brings to light the truth of being, the eternal order, God's kingdom. Whatever leads away from the selfish bondage of material selfhood toward the fuller recognition of the universality and impartiality manifested in the brotherhood of man, calls for the wholehearted support of every true conservative and liberal. There they meet in the singleness of the divine purpose.

All unselfish efforts to improve the social, political, economic, or religious order, to do away with false thinking, prejudice, and unjust discrimination, to afford each individual equal opportunity to put off the limitations of godless material beliefs, and progressively to image forth in thought and life his God-constituted manhood— these are the objectives that are worthy of the support of all men. They are the human footsteps indispensable to the coming on earth of the Father's kingdom for which Christendom so often prays.

Paul Stark Seeley