Editorials

IN crossing the bridge which connects the passing year with a new one, the more thoughtful are apt to look back, and then forward, and this always with the hope that the new year will bring better things than has the old. If it should fail to fulfil this expectation, it would only prove that the hope had not unfolded into faith and thus laid hold upon eternal reality.

THERE never was, never can be a more fatuous undertaking than that upon which men enter when they essay to fool themselves by trying, in some one thing, to evade the requirements of the simple, straightforward logic which they unhesitatingly recognize and act upon in other things. Upon inquiry respecting the matter, the average Christian believer will aver that God is the source of all real being, and that He is wholly good.

"A NEW year," Mrs. Eddy says in the opening sentence of the sermon written for the dedicatory service of The Mother Church edifice, Jan.

APART from the teachings of Christian Science, the relation supposed to exist between soul and body was at one time discussed with a good deal of freedom, when we consider the impossibility of reaching any definite conclusions on the subject by material means. The writer once heard two good deacons disputing warmly over the location of the soul, one insisting that it was in the brain, and the other being quite certain that it was in the heart, and each quoted Scripture in support of his argument.

Practitioners of Christian Science are ofttimes criticized for accepting fees for the treatment of the sick, on the basis that as the Master and his disciples healed the sick without money and without price, Christian Scientists, who profess to be his followers in word and in deed, should do likewise. In the early years of Christian Science Mrs.

Christian Scientists everywhere will welcome the announcement, from the publisher of Mrs. Eddy's books, in the Sentinel of Nov.

THE book of Job has been called by a profound thinker, "a masterpiece of Semitic genius," and scholars have found much pleasure in its dramatic and majestic presentation of the problem of human suffering and the attempts of philosophy and scholastic theology to account for it. Apart from the views of critics and scholars, the wayfaring man, when himself oppressed by the heavy burden of suffering, whether mental or physical, is greatly drawn to the book of Job, and ofttimes is tempted to echo the sad plaint of this just man who, according to the story, had to endure untold misery because Satan desired to afflict him.

AS one comes to think of it, there is no familiar physical fact so central, so all-surrounding as light. Three million suns stud the firmament as silent witnesses to its universality, hence the fitness and frequency of its symbolic use by the Scripture writers.

PROBABLY one of the most comprehensive and effective answers that can be made to the question so often asked, What is Christian Science and how does it operate? is to quote the crystallized definition which Mrs. Eddy gives on page 1 of "Rudimental Divine Science": "The law of God, the law of good, interpreting and demonstrating the divine Principle and rule of universal harmony.

THE mellow harvest days have come again, to bring to many the rich fruitage of their own faithfulness, and to remind others of the saying that "we must bring to wealth all its value; we must do, if we would possess. " Laziness seems appallingly vast in the aggregate, and it is ever arguing how much easier it is to part company with vexatious labor, to commit one's problems to others and believe and do what they say, than to enter into the wrestling with great questions and issues for ourselves.