The human will strives not for mastery over itself but for control over the lives and fortunes of others. Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 490): "Will—blind, stubborn, and headlong—cooperates with appetite and passion. From this cooperation arises its evil." We see children vexed and perplexed by the volleyed vituperation of parents or teachers who do not follow the true way for helping children, which is simply to set a good example and to guide them by walking in the paths of righteousness. In many a family peace of mind is impossible because of the restless arranging and managing of one member, often an invalid, made so by the nervous reaction of anxiety and self-will. Good servants and employees will be diminished in their power to give good service in home or business by the changeable moods of one who should direct work, but instead of that checks and scolds persons, and alters settled arrangements with the moment's caprice.
Then there is "the will to power" which is troubling the world to-day. The advisers of the Ahab of this time are professors instead of priests, teaching the doctrine that if the state has the brute force to do anything there is no moral force to restrain it. This doctrine has a simple and worldwide illustration in the case of individuals who have the "will to drunkenness," which is of the same nature exactly, being the claim of a drunken man that if he has the power to beat his wife, cripple his children, or kill his comrade, he has the right to do so. This right is not admitted generally, however, and we find that communities which have wasted half their revenues on prisons and policemen, insane asylums and attendants, poor farms, judges, courts and officialdom generally, are at this hour seeing a new light and asking, Why not abolish the will to drunkenness instead of dealing with its expensive after effects?
So also is the civilized world asking why it must continue dealing with the after effects of the will to power. In days gone by this will to power in the church subdued the state to its purposes, and in order to make a man who had enlightened views of God recant and accept the materialistic conceptions of priestly tradition concerning Deity, the man's little child would be tortured before his eyes, not to mention the lacerating and burning of his own body with tools invented by diabolical minds. It is the recrudescence of similar methods which made the soldiers of force torture little captive maids dragged to their trenches, so that the chivalrous soldiers of civilization, hearing their cries, might rush forward to the rescue and fall into ambush and certain death. The unscrupulous will to power is well represented by the sinister submarine, lurking in the vicinity of the lifeboat that bears its load of hungering, thirsting, and perishing humanity upon the barren sea, in order to torpedo any ship coming to the rescue. This will to power has strewn the ever hungry sea with innocent victims, and threatened all who resist it with massacre, fear, famine, and fire. It even operates where there is light as well as in the dark places on the earth. Where a child is threatened with ostracism, a woman with loss of her position and living, or a man threatened with a rope around his neck unless subscriptions to a good object are increased, one can see the desire of some to be master by force of others, even where liberty is established, and can recognize the necessity for the regeneration of the normally well behaved man as well as for the repentance of the intoxicated one who claims to be a superman.
