Editorials

Many writers for ages have tried to depict life as it really is, without however, doing more than to represent their limited sense of life, their personal attitude toward experience, their human reaction at whatever comes to their attention. Are gloomy emotions, brutalities, and physical terrors and desires realistic? Are the depths of mortal unworthiness and stupidity, when set down in literary form, the basis for accurate conclusions as to the actuality of human existence? Could a portrayal of merely mortal living as altogether happy be, on the other hand, rightly considered to be realistic in effect by those who are seeking the absolute truth? Each critic of so-called realistic literature has usually formulated his own definition and theory of realism, until the reader nowadays may be puzzled by the many varied concepts when there can be only one truth.

Never has the skeptic enjoyed the opportunity he is enjoying to-day. To begin with, never has it been so safe to be a skeptic.

During the year or more before the armistice, a condition appeared among the Allies which at the time was called war-weariness. This sense of exhaustion suggested itself not only to the soldiers in the trenches but to those at home who were busy in their share of the campaign for rightness.

There is surely no sentence in the English language more compact with scientific meaning than that, on page 468 of Science and Health, which runs, "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. " The reader who has mastered the significance of this saying, even in a slight degree, has embarked upon a voyage into the spiritual world, bursting through the fogs of materiality into the sunlight of Truth, and gaining through the experience an ever broadening perception of the intention of another passage, this time on page 123 of Science and Health, in which Mrs.

Though many thinkers and writers seem nowadays much concerned as to whether civilization is to survive the war experience, the average person might be nonplussed if he were asked to explain what civilization means to him. Thus in Mr.

Nature , Whistler was wont to say, in his humorous way, comparing it to art, was creeping up. It might be said to-day that orthodox exegesis has become so unorthodox that it is creeping up into line with Christian Science.

In spite of jealousies, feuds, and wars, humanity has been seeking a basis of agreement, even though this may not have seemed to be its desire. Often, of course, a despot has tried to impose on the world by force his own will as a basis on which he would have all unite regardless of their inclinations.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the most complex and difficult question in orthodox theology. It is not to be found in a concrete form in the Old or the New Testament, but has to be reached by a process of deduction or inference.

In one sense, each person who turns to Christian Science and applies it even in the slightest degree is a practitioner, in so far as he is practicing in accord with Principle. To speak in another way, however, there is but one practitioner, God or divine Mind, for infinite intelligence is all that can produce and maintain true practice.

It is a pity that the word diplomacy, like the word criticism, has been endowed with a popular meaning which is really a travesty of its true sense. When Sir Henry Wotton half humorously inscribed in a friend's album the definition of an ambassador as a man sent abroad to lie for his country, he gave an inflection to the word diplomacy from which it has scarcely recovered.