Amid the stress and turmoil of a material civilization embracing widely differing ideals and involving rapidly shifting conditions, most individuals find themselves so beset by a multiplicity of pressing and perplexing problems that they are blinded to the fact, made so clear in Christian Science, that the one really fundamental consideration is spiritual, and that all specific human problems bear a merely incidental relation to this issue. According to the rationale of living which appeals to the world at large, the term spirituality stands for a condition of thought and feeling quite apart from the realistic and so-called called practical things of life.
Even those thinkers who are prepared to concede in a speculative way that man is essentially spiritual, are seldom able to turn this theoretical knowledge to practical account in meeting the workaday problems which occupy the arena of human endeavor. It is not strange, therefore, that suffering human sense should be led by the exigencies of daily experience to seek a remedy for its ills on a physical or at best a merely moral plane. As a rule it is only when the question of spiritual causation is brought home to the individual consciousness by physical phenomena of such an unusual character as to arrest attention, that those who are absorbed in the "solid" ends of existence, the man of affairs, the toiler, the thinker, are led to give the matter serious consideration. Hence the signs which "follow them that believe" are as essential now as of old to convince the skeptical thought.
Regarded materially, the world is a paradox. While the moral sensibilities of mankind evince a fundamental demand for righteousness in human conduct, sense testimony contradicts the rule of righteousness in a thousand ways and points to cosmic conditions apparently designed to defeat righteous ends. It is, indeed, a fruitless task to try to reconcile the seemingly lawful reign of discordant forces in nature with the imperative leading of the higher intuitions. To the most exalted prophetic vision the irresistible reaching out for a state of society in which delectable conditions prevail, has always carried with it the profound conviction that evil was destined to be outlawed and overruled in the end; but just how this consummation was to be brought about has remained a mystery. Contaminated as it has been with anthropomorphic superstitions, scholastic theology has persistently begged the question by relegating salvation to a future sphere and making it contingent on external decrees. Alluring as it might appear, the ideal of salvation, as concerned with the present emancipation of mankind from disturbances and ills of all sorts, has commanded little serious attention or sympathy; for only as the lines on which Spirit decrees and administers the universe are comprehended, can the work of divesting experience of unideal features be prosecuted scientifically and conclusively.
