I could answer that by asking, "Why not?" Or, to reverse the popular saying, "Why ride when you can walk?" But I suspect that these answers would at best avoid or evade the meat of the matter.
We may be sure that there are reasons why Mrs. Eddy, that farsighted woman, expected Christian Scientists to write for our periodicals. Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 155-156, 271. It is not just a nicety or a courtesy extended to us by our Church. And it's not just something for us to note in passing and perhaps think, "Oh, it would be nice to see my name in print, wouldn't it? Maybe someday . . . ." Any attempt to write for the periodicals demands a certain amount of mental effort, a honing of thought, a disciplining of an otherwise untamed element: unharnessed potential.
An untrained horse, when first brought under rein, may strike out in every direction, power and energy going to waste as the animal wildly and blindly fights against controls. Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health: "Mortals must emerge from this notion of material life as all-in-all. They must peck open their shells with Christian Science, and look outward and upward. But thought, loosened from a material basis but not yet instructed by Science, may become wild with freedom and so be self-contradictory." Science and Health, p. 552.
