HUMAN history stands for humanadvance. There never has been, there never can be, a backward step.Emergence is the fiat of life. Life without aspiration could not be life, for its end is dust. Every human step in all time has been an effort at betterment. No man ever did evil in evil's name, but always in the name of good. Though his steps were misdirected and the proposed good were but selfish consideration, nevertheless it was his idea of good—of gain, of acquisition. Terrible blunders have been committed, and "by his mistake a man is often instructed" (Science and Health, p. 403). Were men entirely at peace, satisfied in every demand of their nature, they would not so ceaselessly pursue these divergent and haphazard lines of effort. But it is because human thought and action are subject to a limitation obviously inconsonant with an unquenchable and basic demand for liberty, that men daily cast aside that which has failed to satisfy, and pursue their weary wanderings through the empty desert of human hopes.
Long experience has established the proposition that mankind accomplish their emergence from subservience to material forces to their comparative mastery, through discovery of the laws which govern them, —e.g., the great conveniences resulting to modern life from latter-day applications of electricity have resulted from the discovery of a law that the various lines of electrical force could be exerted in a rotary field. Yet all the known laws of electricity have failed to make it anything but a refractory and treacherous servant. Every new law seeming to meet new requirements for public safety but gives rise to new and critical exigencies. It is evident, then, that the world has made next to no progress in discovering the law which governs in absolute finality electricity or anything else in the material world the use of which subjects us to its material limitations and contingent fears.
It is further evident that material sense has no laws at all upon which to depend. A law, to be law, must be "supreme, absolute, and final" (Science and Health, p. 219). Such law cannot be broken. If it be broken in one jot or tittle, it is no more law. It must be without appeal in infinite phase and presentation. Mortal man has sought out many inventions, but all such must lie in the dead and arid plane whose promised oases are but the sad delusions of thirsty and thwarted sense. In the irony of it all, it would sometimes seem that hate and diabolism control the compass. These so-called laws, too often but the handmaid of disaster, have ever received the plaudits of the world as the great discoveries of the ages, the boon of civilization, etc.
But as Elijah discovered of yore that "the Lord was not in the earthquake," so cumulative evidence of all time has built up in the consciousness of man, "line upon line." the existence of a higher law, so different from the drastic and heedless work of material force, so gentle, so lovely, so satisfying in its effects, so mighty and inerrant in its action, so infinite in its application, so unquestionable, final, and sufficient unto itself and the needs of mortals, that all flesh, from the shades of Eden to Thomas the doubter, has fallen unconditionally at its feet to cry in penitent and glad submission, "My Lord and my God." In one word, this "still, small voice," so potent in the lives of men and nations, is Truth—that which is, beyond and outside of which is nothing. Truth and its manifestation includes all that ever has been known, or can be known, or will be known,—that which "was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be;" "whom nothing can erase" (Science and Health, p. 290).
That the truth of being has always been a growing, vigorous, dynamic force in the life of the world, is illustrated in the glorious lives of the seers and prophets who have from time to time sensed divine law. And this Soul sense, won only by a purity and consecration that draws wonderfully nigh to God, good, this discovery of whiterobed, self-existent, all-sufficient Truth, is the only discovery that can be dignified and glorified by the title of revelation.
Without speculating on the extent to which this truth was revealed to Moses and the men of old, we may say that its acquisition by humanity has been progressive, reaching its first culmination in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, a man endowed with the Spirit without measure, and who lived its sacred behests to the full, to his everlasting glory. Jesus taught the fatherhood of God and lived the Life divine. Without a guess as to his knowledge of the letter, we have his own words for the fact that they of that period could not bear it all. Furthermore, in his allusion to the Comforter was the assurance of the further and still progressive nature, of the revelation of Truth. Full well do all Christian Scientists know when and by whom the religion of Christ Jesus—the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man—was revitalized, and a new promise given of humanity's advance through the apprehension of the law of Love.
