All Christendom unites in believing that the mission of the Master was to bring "on earth peace, good-will toward men." If we take simply a superficial glance at present existing conditions of life, we might think that men were farther away than ever before from this exalted condition. On every side we see contention and strife, man apparently against man, capital and labor at war, opposing sects contending for their individual religious ideas. But looking deeper, we find underlying this apparent turmoil, a strong, earnest longing for better conditions, which in many cases amounts to a genuine desire to find the peace which passeth understanding, and which can never be reached until we learn not only to understand our true relation to God, but also the right and real relation of man to man.
In the human consciousness lies a deep conviction that there is a better way of working out life's perplexing problem than that which seems to reign among men today; and this unsatisfied conviction leads to struggles and contentions which only serve to deepen and widen the gulf between man and his brother. The solution of this most important problem was given us by Jesus, when out of the fulness of his great love for God and humanity, he gave us the command to "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength," and "thy neighbor as thyself."
There are few of us who have not heard these words from our earliest years, but we did not know how to obey them. The demand seemed to be that we must love Spirit and matter at the same time. Many of us did strive to love God and our fellow-men, which generally caused us to try to love the errors of our brother, and that, too, without overcoming our own wrong thoughts, consequently we made sorry work of it. But to-day, with deepest gratitude we recognize that one has arisen who can explain these words, and teach us how to live up to them: how to build upon the foundation which Christ Jesus built upon and left for our rich inheritance. For more than thirty years. Mrs. Eddy, our Leader, has been patiently laboring, with a broad, deep love for humanity, with sublime courage and unwavering faith in good, to show us how to follow the commandments of the Master. Through her teachings we are learning rightly to divide between truth and error, to serve both God and man, replacing the false and material sense of our brother with the spiritual and true idea.
