"It's tough, isn't it?" a friend remarked. It certainly seemed so. The friend knew I had not located exactly the kind of job I was looking for. I knew I needed to think more accurately and more deeply about employment and income. To my surprise, though, I found that I was being drawn into thinking about even more fundamental areas of human life. Among them: a deeper sense of economy and of law.
Law? Yes, because I had been accepting for a long time that certain kinds of laws governed my life. Before I found Christian Science, they were the only laws I knew. They seemed logical enough. For instance, I had always accepted as a law of economics that income came from my job and provided a home and a way of life for my family. And a natural law of society seemed to be that a job brought fulfillment, along with a degree of status in my profession and among friends. The job seemed central. When it ended after twenty-five years, the laws of economics and society appeared to decree that my way of life, my own self-confidence, and my place in society were all threatened.
I had rather unthinkingly assumed that the eighteenth-century social philosopher Adam Smith had it about right when he defined (in his Wealth of Nations) an economic law: that if everyone pursued his or her own self-interest, the "invisible hand of capitalism" would regulate the marketplace and create an overarching order. One man's drive for betterment, constantly competing against another's, would keep prices and costs low. Wages, rents, and profits would be distributed by a giant, self-correcting economic mechanism. This view struck me as being far more appealing than Karl Marx's theory, which held that the motive power for progress is the struggle between classes.
