IT would be difficult to designate a teaching of Christ Jesus upon which he laid greater emphasis than upon the thought that no man can serve two masters, that it is quite impossible to follow the right and the wrong, the truth and the error, about anything. No sane person questions the correctness of this teaching, and the self-respect of every honest man must impel him to blame himself alone for every ill resulting from his indifference to it. Indeed, the apparent commonplaceness of the dictum, at once awakens the thought that Christ Jesus must have had in mind a tendency and temptation which is more subtle than any possible impulse to entertain contradictory opinions, or to struggle in behalf of two opposing theories or movements.
Christian Science fundamentally classifies all things and thoughts as either material or spiritual, and understanding this, the deeper significance of our Lord's counsel is perceived,—these are the "masters" between which we must choose. To every intelligent man there are presented two diametrically opposed points of view respecting the nature of the universe and the order of its advance. First, that which finds in matter and its evolution the explanation and law of all change and all progress. Here everything is shaped by its antecedents and its environment. A fixed necessity determines every course and every outcome. The fittest, those creatures which have the greater strength and the larger resourcefulness, survive as a result of an impulse of self-preservation which knows no sympathy or consideration whatever for others. It is a system which regards no other law than this, "Every One for himself, and the devil take the hindmost." Its rule means the death of the imperfect and the weak, and the consequent preservation of the race by the more vigorous and self-assertive. Its rule is that of might, and to this asserted law of nature all creatures, apart from some men, are and ever have been subject in human belief.
If this Law is of divine provision, as it has been and still is regarded by the great body of Christian believers, then Nietzsche, of whom much is being said these days, certainly had legitimate ground for his contention that it should be universally honored, and that any teaching which tends to annul it, and thus to thwart the reign of divine law, merits condemnation. He held that "all life is and always must be a struggle for existence, and that any religion which ignores or obscures this fact cannot endure; that Christianity, just because it is based on sympathy and self-sacrifice, carries within itself the seeds of self-destruction. Christianity orders the strong to give part of their strength to the weak, and so tends," as he argued, "to weaken the whole race. Self-sacrifice is in defiance of nature, and if Christianity were to become universal, the Golden Rule be applied in every instance, the race would die out in a generation,"—land all this for the manifest reason, as he declared, that the fundamental law of all life and progress is diametrically opposed thereto.
