The human mind is supremely euphemistic. It speaks most of its health when it fears most its ills; it says "Farewell," that is, "Be well," or "May good be with you, "while it makes the mental reservation of sorrow or apprehension at separation; it names also welfare, or the state of faring or being well, when it is most obsessed with some untoward condition, either possible or apparent, which consideration of welfare is designed to avert. It is precisely in this derivative sense that welfare is being presented to the American public to-day. It is as if the social reformers said, "The world has become very ill, and now that the condition is acute, or perhaps even chronic, measures of alleviation must be taken to save the remnant." After much investigation and civic bustle, measures are taken, and the public is supposed to support them unquestioningly.
Modern welfare measures fall roughly into two groups: There are those based on the divine right of the public to fare well in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, which take form in playgrounds, parks, open spaces, clean streets, and sanitation,—in all that gives expression to the proverb, "Cleanliness is next to godliness," and to Paul's statement, "He [God] giveth to all life, and breath, and all things." And there are others known as public health measures,—based on an assumed obligation of the public to fare ill, but hiding under the cloak of provision for faring well,—which take form as all sorts of material means and methods to forestall dreaded disease. There can, of course, be no doubt of the immense value to the public of its health, but there is bound to be great question as to whether one measure or another is the irrefutably logical method to pursue in maintaining it, since on no question is the human mind so fearful. Fear is bred of ignorance, and ignorance breeds chaos of thought, usually likely to yield to arbitrary domination for very despair of finding its own way out of its difficulties. In a democracy, however, the duty of the citizen is to be intelligent, not ignorant and therefore fearful of the civic problems that come to him to solve. The obligation is his to check up on the thinking that has been done for him by his representatives in the government or their appointees, lest perchance some slipshod reasoning may have crept in to spoil the final result, just as an error in figures may ruin a sum. And especially is it his duty to do so when his name is used, when the measures adopted are ostensibly for his advantage.
Now if the average citizen were setting out to achieve results in any line of activity, his first move would be to find a firm foundation, a positive base from which to go forward, and he would expect to succeed according as he kept his base in view. By analogy, then, it would seem to be absurd for him or any one to attempt to understand the means to secure the well-being, either of himself or others, without finding first the basis of being, what constitutes it, what its source is, and where it may be found. Yet he finds that this just what modern welfare methods skip over. They are entirely concerned with the well, but solely in apprehension of a possible ill, so that the base of their subject, the fact that its very foundation is being, the source and essence of man, remains a slighted and an unplumbed mystery, the "unknown God" whom the world to-day ignorantly worships. Yet in ancient Greece, to pagan multitudes so great a citizen of the world as Paul, in terms of the one God declared the source of being: "In him [God] we live, and move, and have our being," and with Paul on this unequivocal statement stands to-day that citizen who is a student of Christian Science. It is evident to him that since God is good and All-in-all, as the Bible repeatedly declares, and as he has proved. God is superlative Being, and therefore, in His creation well-being is the only state there is and can be. In this light, welfare or faring well is seen to be the divinely normal state of man in God's image and likeness, and any true welfare measures in human experience will be, therefore, expressions of normal, pure, wholesome living.
