THE critics of Christian Science have not infrequently spoken of its representatives as assuming, both in their statement and bearing, that it is a privilege and a duty not only to be happy but to be free; as both maintaining for themselves and claiming for all others who are governed by Truth, the inheritance of all good, and the legitimate exemption from those so-called human conditions which stand for limitation and discomfort, including that enforced submersion in the struggle for the supply of temporal wants, which is the lot of the worthy poor. The unique grounds of this indictment, which Christian Scientists neither attempt to palliate nor deny, may well be considered.
Ethical teachers have always had much to say respecting the dignity and importance of labor, and its necessary place in every wholesome and happy life, and no word of all this should be unsaid. There is, indeed, no excellency or success without it, but right views respecting legitimate toil! need not render us insensible to the degrading effects of illegitimate drudgery. The passive indifference of many to pitiful conditions, the irresponsiveness to appeal and to proffered opportunity, which are so discouraging to college settlement and kindred workers, testify to the entailed effects of that struggle for existence which begins and concludes the history of multitudes of the industrious and worthy, as well as of the shiftless and seemingly undeserving.
This dumb apathy which has asserted its rule, not only over a large proportion of the "submerged tenth" of all great cities, but over vast areas of peasant life as well, is a dumb devil,—the sequence and representative of uninteresting and unremitting toil, and it awaits the casting out which the Mind that was in Christ Jesus can alone effect.
