The spiritual interpretation of the Lord's Prayer as given by our Leader (Science and Health, pp. 16, 17) thus defines the petition for daily bread: "Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished affections;" and if ever Christian Scientists needed grace for each day it is now, for on their thinking depends, to a much larger extent than they perhaps recognize, the form of the world which will presently emerge from the melting pot in which it is now seething. It is beyond question that Mrs. Eddy foresaw the immense importance to humanity of the unity of the two brandies of the Anglosaxon race, a unity to be based not on merely political grounds, but on the more fundamental basis of a common determination to uphold the methods which make for right and progressive government. Now that this unity has become happily an accomplished fact, it is our business to see that it is neither disintegrated nor perverted from its destiny by any of those hidden reactionary forces which would naturally oppose themselves to it.
Those of us who have been brought by circumstances into immediate contact with these terrific detonations of human forces, have turned constantly to the study of the Bible prophecies for light and information, and especially to that chapter of Mark's gospel where Jesus speaks of the conditions which he saw must arise in human experience before the spiritual idea is fully recognized and acknowledged. He foresaw that immense upheavals must convulse human thought, and added, "These are the beginnings of sorrows." The writer will never forget the extraordinary illumination and comfort which came with a more exact translation of those words,— "These are the beginnings of birth pangs;" for this translation shows exactly what is happening, and that the birth of the new world must be forwarded by the "elect," for whose sake, the Master added, the suffering of those days will be shortened. The '"elect" must unquestionably be those who understand the spiritual idea, and who work for its establishment among men.
The Christian Science movement then, as a whole, should realize what is demanded of it, and individual Christian Scientists have found that if they are to meet those demands and not be engulfed in the new flood which has overtaken the world, the first necessity is to recognize the nature of the catastrophe. This may be epitomized in one word, revolution,—a revolution the first symptoms of which, it is easy now to see, came to which it is those tremendous years between 1790 and 1815, whose development made the nineteenth century a constant battleground between reactionary and progressive forces. More recently, too, the physical world has been convulsed by a series of cataclysms, ill which floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions have succeeded each other with awful rapidity, thus fulfilling literally the terms of Jesus' prophetic utterance.
