Thomas Paine advanced the idea that "instead of seeking to reform the individual, the nation should apply itself to the reform of the system," and Christian Scientists have been criticized not a little on the ground that in their distinctive individualism they neglect what are believed to be the larger, more promising opportunities to do good. It seems to be the conviction of these critics that men may be saved en masse; that the millennium can be inaugurated by legislative enactment, and that of course at once.
If Paine had said, While seeking to reform the individual we should seek to reform the system, he would have been quite right, but his suggested way of bringing about world redemption by voting for it can make serious appeal to those only who forget that in representative government no law can be enforced, save to the degree that it is supported by an alert and assertive moral sentiment. The expressed conscience, the insistent right purpose of the people, is the only assurance of a just government, and however meritorious the measure championed, the only hope of permanent good to be achieved by it lies in the moral awakening of individual men and women, and every great and successful reformer has at once addressed himself to the accomplishment of this end. Luther could never have won his victory had it not been for the tremendous moral stimulus which he brought to the German people, and no more could Mrs. Eddy have wrought her great work had she not experienced for herself and brought about in others a great spiritual advance.
It is lamentably true that the administration of justice is sometimes found a long way behind the dictum of the moral sense of the great majority of the people, and this fact witnesses either to the corruption of their representatives in office, or to that willingness to allow communal affairs to be dominated by rings and bosses, which to their shame so grievously characterizes the well-to-do and even the religious. A community's highest conviction of right should always be expressed in its economic conditions and its administration of justice, even as the highest moral sense of the nation should be expressed in all its diplomacies and international relations.
