MOST people come to Christian Science for personal reasons. They find that it restores their health, strengthens their moral character, improves the harmony of their homes and business, and gives them a practical religion and membership in an active and interesting church. But the mission of Christian Science, as Mrs. Eddy says of the mission of Jesus, is "both individual and collective" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 18). Its purpose is to bring salvation not only to individuals but to mankind as a whole; to establish improved and eventually ideal social, economic, and political conditions, no less than improved and eventually ideal individuals. Indeed, the two things are but facets of a single process—the spiritualization of human thought and action.
Society cannot be redeemed except through the appearing of better and nobler citizens, and these can only be produced by scientific Christianity. But individuals cannot be truly Christian without seeking to reform those social conditions and practices which produce poverty, injustice, frustration, and suffering for themselves and their neighbors, often seemingly through no fault of their own. It is not enough that Christian Scientists should heal soldiers of their wounds, or the victims of bad man-made laws or bad economic systems of their individual sufferings. Their more important function is to end war, social injustice, and undeserved poverty by eliminating from human thought whatever is unlike Principle. Christian Science has a governmental as well as an individual program. It was defined by our Leader, once for all, in the well-known passage at the end of the chapter of Science and Health entitled "Science of Being" (p. 340).
The need for the application of our understanding of Christian Science to public affairs was never more urgent than it is today. An immense amount of the sickness, sin, poverty, and distress of our time is the result of erroneous collective thought. Both war and economic depression bring in their train consequences for millions of people which can be fully removed only by the healing of the political and economic thinking which produces them. Humanity would be immeasurably freer and happier, and the hatred, fear, and suffering which oppress it today would be immensely lessened, if the unity of men and nations, under sound political and economic laws which would end war and poverty, were brought into being. To enable us to demonstrate the divine Principle which alone can bring about this state of affairs is precisely the purpose of Christian Science.
