" A NEW year is a ... prophecy and promise clad in white raiment." These cheery words of Mrs. Eddy, for our entry upon 1916, are found on the first page of "Pulpit and Press," and the best thing about them is that we can be sure they are true today, though the human sky seems so clouded. Much of the past and of the present may speak for the government of evil, but there can be no question that the future belongs to good, even as it is written, "The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea."
For an exceeding great company of rejoicing people this God-filled, God-governed new era has had its beginning by virtue of the fact that they have come to know in Christian Science that in its every form and phase evil is but darkness. For these—and their number is multiplying wonderfully— the word of Truth as spoken by Isaiah the prophet is fulfilled, "Darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his gloryshall be seen upon thee." Despite the fact, therefore, that to the vision' which is horizoned by materiality the outlook bodes increasing ills in startling fulfilment of the declaration in Science and Health (p. 565) that "when nearing its doom, . . . evil increases and becomes the great red dragon, swollen with sin, inflamed with war against spirituality, and ripe for destruction," nevertheless "the glory of the Lord" is risen upon us.
There is no question today respecting the inflamed dragon and all the rest of the dreadful picture of existing wrong, and if thought clings to the darkness, then pessimism is enthroned and there can be no new year; but he who has come to apprehend the nothingness nature of these frightening experiences of material sense, and who has even glimpsed Truth's infinite light, for him the great day has dawned. The understanding of Christ has become his sunrise, and old night can never come again. The Word saith, "In the beginning God,"—and this "beginning," understood as an eternal now, bases all real Science and all real freedom. He who begins with demonstrable Truth can never be separated from it. If human experience chronicles a lapse, then there surely was no true beginning, no finality of faith, no closing of the door on all but God, and under these conditions the new year can but be delayed. In such an event the larger hope and the remaining possibility of song resides in the fact that a mighty protest is being heard in every land, and it is saying, "This wrong has no right to be;" and tomorrow it will begin to say, and that knowingly, "In God's name it shall not be."
