Never perhaps in the history of the world have the ideas of utility and efficiency been so strongly emphasized in every-day life as they are today. More and more, men and women are demanding that employees, methods, processes, machines, every one and every thing, shall accomplish desired ends with reduced effort, increased despatch, and greater certainty than ever before. It is matter of common observation that every day sees improvements in all lines of business and in every profession, as well as the banishment of weighed-and-wanting systems. Each step in progress indicates a greater emancipation from manual drudgery and a fuller appreciation of the value of thought as applied to the affairs of every-day living, a fact to which Mrs. Eddy alludes when she writes, "In the material world, thought has brought to light with great rapidity many useful wonders" (Science and Health, p. 268). She then adds: "With like activity have thought's swift pinions been rising toward the realm of the real, to the spiritual cause of those lower things which give impulse to inquiry. Belief in a material basis, from which may be deduced all rationality, is slowly yielding to the idea of a metaphysical basis, looking away from matter to Mind as the cause of every effect."
These evidences of evolution and revolution are by no means confined to business and professional lines of human endeavor; they are equally characteristic of religious activities. Thousands of deeply religious men and women, not only affiliated with the churches, but without any church connections, feel the urgent need of a more utilitarian, a more efficient, a more satisfying religion than the one they have been taught to reverence or than others which they have perhaps investigated, a religion which will be an active force with them for seven days of every week and for twenty-four hours of every day, a religion which will give them the food that their spiritual natures crave.
Many of these people have ceased to take any active interest in the churches of their fathers because they do not find therein the spiritual food or the stimulus that they need. They have perhaps caught the higher strain, the note of what seems a nobler sense, "a beauteous order that controls with growing sway the growing life of man," and have yearned to attune their lives to it. Perhaps while they have vainly "watched to ease the burden of the world," they have seen within "a worthier image for the sanctuary" and have "shaped it forth before the multitude, divinely human," only to have their pearls trampled upon by those whom they desired to help. Rather than continue to endure such agony, they have gone forth heart-sick and hungry, to search for God wherever their spiritual cravings have led them.
