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.
Over against this utterly heartless and altogether fatalistic law of physical evolution is "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus," that law which enforces the Golden Rule, which impels to vicarious sacrifice, which returns good for evil, and which fulfils the ideal of life that Christ Jesus brought into demonstration before men and angels. The recognition of the contrast between these two is not new. Long since, the supporters of the evolutionary hypothesis perceived that the law supposed to govern the evolution of the animal, and the law governing the development of humanity, were at war with each other, but few have dared with Nietzsche to stand unreservedly for the material against the spiritual. Nevertheless it is apparent that if this law of material evolution, which most Christian believers regard as of nature and hence of God, is to obtain among men, then the law of the Golden Rule must be abrogated. Jesus said, "No man can serve two masters," and in his insistence upon a logical sequence of thought by those who accept the law of physical evolution as a law of the universe, Nietzche supported the same proposition, he was saying that men must deny the legitimacy and divine provision of material law or they must give up the fundamental teaching of Christ Jesus. He, himself, took the latter course, and in his last book, which he boldly named, "Anti-Christ," he railed at Christian teaching as utterly subversive of natural law, and hence the enemy of the race!
Christian believers have, in all sincerity, stood for the teaching of Christ Jesus, the law of Love, but for the most part they have not given up their allegiance to material law as a divine manifestation, and the lamentable results bear impressive witness to the inconsistency of their position. A distinguished Christian minister and teacher has just appeared in print as a critic of Christian Science, and in opposing its teaching he declares that men are hopelessly unable to change human experience. Whatever Christians may believe, or essay to do, sin, sickness, and death, as he affirms, are, and will remain, constant factors of life! Another prominent minister has recently said in outlining a Christian faith, "We do not believe in praying ... for the miraculous cure of the sick!"
Jesus was eternally right! No man can serve two masters. It is impossible to follow Christ while remaining loyal to materiality. One or the other must be given up. The material law of evolution eliminates the enfeebled and the incapable, while the sympathy and unselfishness which Christianity inculcates preserves all these, and, consequently, Christian peoples have had to shoulder the tremendous disability inhering in the fact that in large part (in most part to-day) the race is being propagated by the pitifully unfit.
Both the seriousness of this situation and the inconsistency of the position maintained by the majority of Christian believers are apparent, and to all Christian Scientists the only solution of the difficulty is no less apparent. With the ardor and insistence of a prophet Mrs. Eddy has pressed upon the thought of this age the teaching of the Master, not only respecting the necessity of choosing between materiality and spirituality, but with respect to the means by which the law of evolution, etc., may be ignored without detriment to the race, namely, by healing the unfit, the weak and the unfortunate, the sinning and the sinned against, the sick and the suffering. Christian Science demands that the physically weak be made strong, it assures us that the power of God shall make us "more than conquerors" over human conditions, and if in all the past the followers of Christ Jesus had been honestly and unreservedly committed to the realization of this concept, the lamentable acquiescence of the great body of Christian people to-day in the reign of asserted material laws which Jesus resisted and annulled, would not constitute, as it certainly does now, one of the most serious obstacles to the consummation of the world's redemption.
Christian Scientists are impelled and compelled, both by the spirit and the precept of their teaching, to "rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good" (Science and Health, p. 393), and in the measure of their loyalty and their love they are proving that as the choice of Spirit and its holy law is made and adhered to, the whilom cruel mastery of matter and its unjust decrees is escaped from and inspiring progress is made toward the realization of the kingdom of heaven on earth.
