At a time when the Christian Science movement is commanding an unusual amount of public attention, many are wondering just what it stands for, what it has to offer for the solution of the world's problems,—the righting of its wrongs, the alleviation of its sorrows, the relief of its pain. These queries are legitimate, and it is because Christian Science is practically addressing itself to human conditions and doing something which is positive and substantial for their betterment that it deserves and is receiving so much favorable consideration at the hands of honest truth-seekers the world over.
We are passing through a seismic mental era in which the travail of human sense is registered in an unrest, an attitude of questioning, which characterizes every plane and department of life; and though they may not sense the fact, in their demand for a fairer chance and larger freedom, for the administration of justice, the exhibition of honesty, consistency, and true brotherliness, men are calling out of their deeps for the living God, for Life, Truth, and Love; and the earnestness and universality of the call give sure word of prophecy that it will be answered. Moreover, this ethical demand for the things which Christ Jesus declared to be the essential possessions and prerogatives of spiritual consciousness, witnesses to the all-important fact that a more vital Christianity, even the demonstrable understanding of the Christ, Truth, is the one cure for the world's ills, the one perfect answer to its need, and it is in its intelligent recognition of the human status, its loyalty to the one remedy which Christ Jesus utilized for all human ailments, and its convincing proofs of the present and undiminished potency of this remedy, that Christian Science finds its commendation and its ever-increasing strength.
Browning has said that next to the longing for immortality, one of the most fundamental demands of the human is that for unity, and it is clear that this can be satisfied only as the oneness, the all-inclusiveness, of God is apprehended. The belief that there is more than one life and power; that there is a material good as well as a spiritual, has inevitably led to the assumption that there is more than one remedy for disharmony, and hence the demoralizing belief that physical ills are to be healed by one thing, mental by another, economic by yet another, and so on through the whole list of human disabilities, until Christian thought has come to honor quite as many remedial powers as there were gods in the Greek Pantheon. Surely the initial word of revelation, together with Jesus' loving call and assurance to all, demands the startling and distinctive restatement which Christian Science is giving it to-day,—"The Lord our God is one Lord." "Come unto me, all ye that . . . are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
