LEAGUES of desolate snow-covered plains, a gray repellent sky, an endless horde of ravenous wolves stealthily moving across the bleak waste, — thus had the artist conveyed his conception of "Famine." Driven deep into his soul by bitter experience was a similar picture in the labor leader's consciousness when, on being invited to consider Christian Science, he said, "Let us settle this 'bread and butter' question first."
No one knew better than did our Master that man lives not "by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God," yet he commanded the disciples to feed the multitudes "lest they faint in the way." Even so the Christian Scientist does not offer mere platitudes to humanity, a barren jargon of words that choke instead of feed. He knows too well that it doth not profit, "if a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body." Nay! it is mostly because he too has seen the famine-wolves of hunger and disease flee before the warm sunshine, the truth of Christian Science, that he offers the loaf to his brother and sister. The laboring man wants hard, concrete facts,—quite rightly, too,—and Christian Science wants every man to be satisfied with nothing less. The sick man healed, the poor sister's poverty removed by the command of a demonstrable Science which the simplest can understand, sin destroyed, worry dispelled,—are not these the very things that are most needed?
Men may say that these do not restore justice, remove evil, inequalities of position and wealth; but are they not mistaken? Of what use are the chains and fetters, if the slave is free and smilingly regards them as relics of an ancient nightmare, dispelled as he awoke to their fictitious character? The emancipation of one by a given rule, prophesies the freedom of all; as Ruskin shows us in "Unto This Last," that the power of a guinea in a man's pocket depends upon the absence of a similar sum in the other man's pocket. If this is so, and Christian Science destroys the sense of lack in the "other man," the power of the tyrannical trust or capitalist is broken.
