THE longing for fuller life, for love, for peace and joy, makes the eye shine with anticipation and the heart beat higher. But struggle and unrest appear to characterize the course of time and history. Peaceful times alternate with times of convulsion. He who holds existence to be material, and man and life to be mortal, looks upon all this as a matter of course; in fact, he would consider it unnatural for so tremendous a stream as that of human existence to flow along without depositing a great deal of debris. The fact that the movement is somewhat uniform is cause for joy. Everything moves forward somehow; and if there be a common endeavor at all in the stream of human existence, surely it is that of progress.
It has ever been the hope of the thinker that progressive enlightenment and education will put an end to class distinction and reconcile nations; and that a common spiritual bond will ultimately form the indestructible guaranty of the peace of mankind. Christianity has been called the road to this goal, and rightly so; for, indeed, wherever it firmly sets foot in its world-wide course, there soon spring up better morals and a higher sense of citizenship. The suppression of slavery, the successes in the fight against alcohol, the ever nearing equalization of the sexes, the improvement in legislation and in the administration of justice everywhere, as well as the attempts at the prevention of war,—all these point to the fact that mankind is seriously getting ready to cast off its fetters.
The great spiritual seer of this age, Mary Baker Eddy, says in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 256), "Progress takes off human shackles;" but she was far from looking upon progress as a chain of material events, with the perfection of material existence at the end of it. In the light of her Christian metaphysics, which are clear and final, matter has no history, because there is inherent in it neither reality nor cause; and its seeming cause, mortal mind, cannot understand true progress. God, infinite Mind, is the only cause; and His manifestations, which are spiritually true and perfect, are, in reality, all that can be cognized. True progress, therefore, is the ever widening recognition of that which is eternally true and perfect. This applies to changes in the life of communities and nations, just as it does to the minutest experience of the individual.
