Never, probably, since the discovery of Christian Science, has the world been in such turmoil as it is today, with "men's hearts failing them for fear." They are thus troubled because they see war and hear of rumors of war, barbarous attacks on women and children from the air, poverty and unemployment, and the ruthless persecution of individuals by arbitrary rulers, regardless of justice or mercy. And they can see no way of bringing these evils to an end.
But Christian Science has come to heal collective ills no less than individual ills, to unify men and nations, to abolish undeserved poverty or unemployment, to end war, to establish the brotherhood of man on earth. Jesus prophesied that these "wars and rumours of wars" and other troubles would precede the establishment of the kingdom of heaven upon earth, which makes it all the more imperative that we should consider and understand how we can use the Science of Christianity to bring order out of political and economic chaos, do away with crime, and so establish the millennium which it is the mission of Christian Science to achieve.
Christian Science does not rely upon mere petitioning to an almighty God to intervene to restore order in a material universe of which He is supposed to be the creator. It proclaims that the universe which God has made is spiritual and perfect, and that our task is to use our understanding of God, Spirit, to free ourselves from the erroneous material sense of things, and so find our place in the perfection which is our individual and collective birthright. Its actual method of dealing with public or political or economic problems is fundamentally the same as its method of dealing with individual problems. The method of individual healing is set forth in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy in the well-known passage (pp. 476, 477): "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick." In Jesus' healings it was the "correct view" of man as God's likeness—the truth itself about God and man—that did the healing work. Jesus possessed this because of his spirituality and understanding of God. And the way by which we can also attain to this direct vision or recognition of the truth of being is through purification from selfishness, sensuality, willfulness, and all the other claims of the beast and the false prophet referred to in Revelation, and the putting on of strong and noble manhood and womanhood.
