What constitutes a truly radical stand, as understood in Christian Science, is of interest to the whole world. For any seeming whatever, there must be the true idea. There could not even seem to be a vigorous desire for progress, for instance, without there being the truth about it. Because Christian Science shows this truth, as applied infinitely throughout all experience, it must prove the fulfillment of every right desire. Hence any one turning sincerely to it for help must find that, losing nothing, he gains whole satisfaction such as, perhaps, he had hardly dared to believe possible.
On page 452 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy declares that "Right is radical." Unfortunately, however, the fact that right alone is really radical has been lost sight of in all ages by those who have been content with mere radicalism. The meaning of the suffix ism is important. Lowell once spoke of "that class of untried social theories which are known by the name of isms." The term, as thus used, implies, of course, disparagement. Emphatically Mrs. Eddy says on page 28 of "Retrospection and Introspection," "I believe in no ism." The difference between radicalism and really radical understanding is, therefore, the difference between the counterfeit and the genuine.
The radicalism of yesterday becomes the conservatism of to-day simply because it is all a poor makeshift based on the supposition of materiality. How tame it seems to refer to liberalism or progressivism in these days of socialism, communism, and bolshevism. Yet in the last analysis, as Christian Science shows clearly, the widest apparent divergencies between any such forms of extremism are but shadings of nothingness. One and all, these gradations rest on the false hypothesis that so-called mortal, material life is the reality. One and all, therefore, they must sooner or later give place to the eternal rightness of true Life, which is the one divine consciousness with its infinitely vigorous activity.
