A STUDENT of Christian Science, who had for some months been conferring with many people from all quarters of the globe, found herself suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of the emergencies and complexities of the world.
Every new contact seemed to disclose new problems. And what loomed as particularly confusing at this time was the fact that each national and racial group—speaking from the premise of its own concept of material selfhood—could sound not only reasonable but right. Feuds appeared logical and fears legitimate; political, economic, and territorial claims that had seemed, from the outside, altogether fraudulent became, when viewed from the standpoint of the claimants, virtually unanswerable. Each bloc, in brief, was concerned with the same thing. Each was seeking, with every means at its disposal, to protect or to establish its own particular concept of good.
But however sympathetically this fact was realized, the central picture—of a world implacably at loggerheads with itself—was still left intact. Nor did it help, the student recognized, simply to abstract these conflicting claims into the current terms of East and West, Right and Left, Capitalism and Communism. A hundred years ago the labels had been different; in another hundred years they might be something else. So impermanent and so shifting were the human patterns that the enemies of one period were the allies of the next; systems that appeared absolute could dissolve like fog; while causes that in their own day were believed to be valid could later be written off as tragically false.
