How to be in the world and not of it is a question which has vexed the religious mind from time immemorial; in fact, it is hardly too much to say that the pathway of history is paved with a mosaic, much of it very beautiful, of shattered efforts to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable states of mind. In despair of finding any resting-place for the soles of their feet in the stress of ordinary affairs, men have been driven into the desert, into lunatic asylums, into all manner of extremes, as their times or temperaments dictated, in the desire to find some way of living the religious life.
During the middle ages, when the chief occupation of a gentleman was to raid his neighbor's cattle, or to destroy as much of his property as could not conveniently be carried away, the monastery was probably the only possible retreat for those who even in such dark times hungered after righteousness. But we have only to read the annals of those communities to see how far they were from maintaining the spiritual ideal to which they owed their inception. The Reformation in its efforts at wholesale destruction of abuses did not by any means solve the problem; it merely changed its form, and so we see history repeating itself. From the times of Jerome and Augustine to the period of George Fox and the Society of Friends, the same attempt to maintain the spiritual ideal in the material world was gradually encroached upon by "the world," and with the passing away of the originator of each particular effort, the ideal itself was submerged in the general trend of human thought.
All this is preliminary to the consideration of the fact that Christian Scientists are confronted with the same difficulty,—how to be in the world, and yet not conformed to it, and how they must be equipped to win in what the followers of all other systems have found to be a losing battle. For information on this, as on every other point, the Christian Scientist naturally turns to the Bible, and especially to the teachings of Jesus the Christ; and it is a remarkable fact that he said practically nothing about it. Beyond the brief reference in the seventeenth chapter of John, "I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil," there is really no definite statement on the subject at all. Yet it is quite evident from the conditions the Master imposed upon those who wished to be his disciples, that nothing less than complete self-abnegation as regards "the world" was demanded, although while laying down the strictest rules of admission to his kingdom, he lived the daily life of the people around him, attended their feasts, shared their meals, stayed in their houses, talked with them, went to their synagogues, and was apparently just one of them.
