AMONGST the many aphorisms which Shakespeare gave to the world none is truer than the statement that "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." One need search no farther than the New Testament for an illustration of this, for even our Master was assailed by this form of subtle temptation. Unfortunately for the Christian religion many of its adherents have been made the willing exponents of a false method of handling the Scripture. By the wrong interpretation of the sacred Word the Church opposed the Copernican system in astronomy and the corroborative discoveries of Galileo. "Principalities and powers" used to quote the Bible in support of the slave trade and polygamy, and some people still use it to favor the drink traffic. Remembering this, one is not surprised to find the evil of poverty upheld by Scriptural malquotation, as an immovable phenomenon in God's universe. Jesus, within a few days of his crucifixion, in rebuking those who through coveteousness and lust for money murmured at Mary's generous and prophetically consecrating act of anointing her Master's head with precious ointment, said, "The poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always." This utterance has been vigorously seized and constantly applied, both vehemently and glibly as occasion presented, to hinder any wide-sweeping reforms in economic legislation whereby a partial or total obliteration of the "poor classes" was aimed at To this, as to many other misinterpretations, we may follow the Master's example and quote from the same source in reply: so in the words of Jesus addressed to the conservative Pharisee of his day we find an answer to these modern opposers of the kingdom on earth: "Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God."
A few weeks after that memorable act of Mary, when Jesus gave his parting commands to his disciples, he said, "Lo I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. When we remember that Jesus had already said that "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away," we must admit that either he was forgetful and contradicted himself, or that when he spoke of not always being with them, he must have referred to his human selfhood which he held, to mortal-view, in the flesh; and that when he spoke of his constant companionship with those who obeyed his commands, he referred to his real spiritual selfhood which he had with the Father before the world (the material, illusive sense-world) was. Now Jesus knew that he could make his demonstration over the belief of life in matter, or, in other words, destroy the seeming power of death, in three days, and that the time was rapidly approaching for him to do so. He also knew that the world which had not accepted his teaching would move very slowly in destroying every phase of the false belief in a life opposed to God. One of these phases was poverty, therefore he spoke of them as having the poor, or poverty, always with them, in the same sense in which sin and sickness are always present to mortal belief, which denies that Christ, Truth, is ever-present.
If a more complete ignoring of a command of Jesus than has been displayed in the case of the order to "Heal the sick" be possible, it is to be found in the failure of the Christian church to fulfil the command to preach the gospel, the good news, to the poor.
It may be suggested by the eccleciastical apologist that the church has been foremost in alleviating the cruel conditions of the poor; this we willingly admit. So it has behaved with regard to the sick, but it has healed neither, and has never attempted to do so in Jesus' way since the third century. The solace which scholastic theology has offered to the poor is similar to that which it offers to the pain-racked invalid; namely, a reward in heaven, meaning by that a place far away in the skies, to be reached at some time in the dim future. Through the noble efforts of well-meaning religionists, farm colonies have been organized, besides free meals, shelters, social clubs, country excursions, etc., to lift the lives of the poor out of their sordid monotony. We acknowledge the Christian purpose manifested in the cooling of the fevered brow, the moistening of the parched lips, the watching through those seemingly endless hours of night when the dawn refuses to break, when the darkest hour sinks to a darker and still there is no gleam of light athwart the invalid's dark shadow of pain. Nay, was it not in such hours that the Founder of the Christian Science Church mentally labored and travailed to give birth to the Christ-idea which had begun to dawn upon her waiting thought? Was it not through the sad experience of the Church's failure to solve the "Wherefore?" of the pain of the innocents, and the "Why?" of the hungering, poverty-stricken masses, that she felt it necessary to start where the Church left off?
During nineteen centuries the Spirit of God has been brooding over the waters of human thought, and the divine fiat, "Let there be light," has been permeating slowly the deadened material senses of a dreaming world, while here and there, men and women, both Christian and skeptic, have caught glimpses of a possible Utopia. These have been mostly the peerings of the finite mind out of its own unbearable state of consciousness, and eyes unused to the new light have not been able to focus the distances of its vision. With a tragically pathetic ending too often the well-meaning efforts of social reformers and Utopian colonists have sunk in the shifting sands and unstable waters of mere human endeavor. The fountain can rise no higher than its source, and experience and history show that that which produces evil cannot cure it, and that the human mind, notwithstanding its many marvelous inventions (to itself), is yet inadequate to the task of achieving its own salvation. The prophet Isaiah saw this when he said in his customary beautiful imagery, "Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall." In the next verse he gives the only secret of certain success, "But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint."
It has remained for the author of Science and Health to give, through the divine Science which Jesus lived and taught, the solution of the problem of poverty as she has of the problem of sin and disease. "The poor have the gospel [good news] preached to them," said Jesus, when he enumerated to John's disciples the proofs that he was the Messiah. In running over the different diseases from which mankind suffered, it is significant that he also mentioned their cure, and we cannot, and have not, any reason to separate poverty from the others. Clearly if the blind received that which they lacked, namely, sight, then the good news to the poor meant the supply of all things necessary to obliterate their disease of poverty. This, then, is the good news to the poor; this, then, was one of the proofs that he was the Anointed of God; this, then, was a necessary item in his authority for his work. Can we, then, afford to ignore that which he thought so important? can we honestly offer to the poor the empty promise that some day in the future they will have an extra good time of it if they bear their poverty patiently? Misguided religionists have told the suffering invalids that God intended them to suffer for some inscrutable reason; they have also told the poor that God intended them to be in that station of life, and that it was opposing the will of God if they tried to get out of it.
If Madame Roland, kneeling to the statue of Liberty, could say, "O Liberty! Liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name!" well may the true Christian say, O Christianity! what crimes are committed in thy name!
Outside of Christian Science, poverty has been attributed to various causes. Twenty years ago it was strongly held that alcoholism was the cause of poverty; since then this has been shown to be a fallacy, by economists who found that in many lands poverty and temperance stalk hand in hand. Where poverty has been associated with alcoholism it has often been found that the habit was but the outcome of a desire to gain a brief respite from wretchedness. Robert Malthus stated that poverty was due to the fact that the means of subsistence increases only in arithmetical ratio, while the population increases in geometrical ratio,—a statement inexact statistically and incorrect logically. Balanced any single day there is always a sufficiency to supply all necessaries over and over again to all the people in the world. This fact has led the economist to the most consistent material theory of the solution of poverty; namely, equal distribution by the State; but if that were possible, it would not obliterate the covetousness, greed, and lust in the individual. Did Ahab's plenty eliminate his greed for Naboth's vineyard? No! An epitome of the world's character is found in the twelfth chapter of 2 Samuel, where Nathan rebukes David for his sin. "And Nathan said to David, . . . Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, I anointed thee king over Israel, and I delivered thee out of the hand of Saul; and I gave thee thy master's house, and thy master's wives into thy bosom, and gave thee the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little I would moreover have given unto thee such and such things. Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the Lord, to do evil in his sight? thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife."
The mortal mind is largely composed of lust, malice, greed, envy, and jealousy, and it will not be tamed or submit to a government composed of the same minds. Imagine for a moment that all the foregoing statements concerning the human mind were personified, and that the person was arraigned before a perfect judge and jury, what think you would be the verdict and sentence? Would it not be "guilty," and the sentence to be that of death? Yes! Even so, and that is the Christian Science sentence to this carnal mind,—death, annihilation; it is Jesus' sentence, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me." It was also Paul's sentence that we "mortify the deeds of the body, that we "die daily."
Does this mean the annihilation of the man? No! Jesus said "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's [the good news which includes abundance], the same shall save it." In this way, and in this way alone, will man find his true individuality, he will awake to a full understanding that "the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof;" he will lose that bane of existence, the sense of human ownership which is essentially fear. He will lose his sense of dependence upon a human employer, upon the rise and fall of the money-market, the fluctuations of trade the personal caprice of a customer, the competition of unscrupulous men. He will learn that poverty is a disease as much as the well-defined diseases of materia medica; that it is governed by the same laws (so-called) that govern physical troubles; namely, heredity, climate, accident, excess, environment, fear, revenge, malice,—that all go to manifest the complaint of poverty, and all can be made null and void by the understanding of the spiritual law governing man in divine Science. Man will come to know that God's kingdom and government does not make men even interdependent, and here we out-distance the most advanced socialism, and its opposite method, anarchism. For God can furnish a table in the wilderness, and the Wayshower, Jesus, fed the thousands irrespective of corn-laws or "corners in wheat." Think what huge burlesques a food trust or any other commercial monopoly would be were the world composed of true disciples of him who could supply thousands immediately with loaves and fishes, walk the waves, and annihilate space on a boat journey when even the winds were contrary! Man is the infinite reflection of infinite Mind who made the "plant of the field before it was in the earth." God needs no crooked figure with a hoe for His fields already white for harvest. He condemns only the material lie to till its own soil, and stations the angel with the flaming sword of Truth to prevent the possibility of the material lie entering the domain of Spirit.
In reaching this consciousness of man as God's reflection the so-called material man will pass through various stages in his progress from sense to Soul; his daily work will be improved, his capacities for endurance will be enlarged, the shoddy material will go, as will also doubtful methods of "making it pay," and friction with business associates will cease by the application of the oil of charity. He will learn, either by painful experience or by divine Science that he dare not play the part of Ananias, that God will not share His power with any false god, that it is a solid fact that a man rich in material beliefs cannot enter the kingdom of Spirit, that on every page of life's experience is written the demand to give up the material sense of life and gain the spiritual. Only as the thoughts of poverty are driven out of his consciousness and each illusion dispelled, only as he grasps the meaning of God as the All in all, the eternal Father-Mother, and man as the eternal son "having neither beginning of days nor end of life," then, and not till then, will he be released from the fear and manifestation of lack of supply in all directions.
Does all the foregoing affect only the man in the slums? By no means! The millionaire, fearful of having a dollar more on the expenditure side of this year's balance as against that of last, is stricken with poverty more than is the Scottish cottager who will contribute toward sending "a lad of pairts" to a college. It applies to all—the woman managing a large establishment with servants, the woman squeezing through the week on her husband's small wage, the small shopkeeper, the business salesman, the traveler who sells on commission, the student filling his vacation with clerical work,—by patient, persistent mental work, each will be shown either the way out or the successful way in his business.
Let no one be discouraged or sad if it often seem to be a clinging on in the dark. Gethsemane is not merely a place in Palestine; it represents that condition of thought which is entailed in the process of rising superior to the testimony of the material senses; it stands for the last hours before the crucifixion, but it is well to remember that it is also a few hours only to the resurrection.
It may be thought that Christian Scientists do not orally preach the gospel to the poor, and that by this seeming neglect they are doing nothing for those in actual want. This charge can well be borne by Scientists until the world understands the power of silent mental work in Christian Science and learns that the actual demonstration over lack of supply with a bondaged brother does a thousandfold more towards lifting the burden of poverty from off the shoulders of the masses than do all the stereotyped wordy sermons of which the poor man knows there are too many already. Of the private generosity of Christian Scientists as individuals, the writer has certain knowledge, but we know that the mere giving of money is the easiest excuse to an awakened conscience. It is often harder not to give, to bear the silent reproach for meanness, while you strive to show the victim of the belief in poverty the way out of it in the only way, the Christ-Science way. The money method is a soothing-syrup for the passing hour, the Christian Science method is potent for all eternity,— it is the fulfilling of the Master's injunction, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness [right-wiseness, right-thinking]; and all these things shall be added unto you."
