Editorials

The Church Manual of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, written by the beloved Leader of the Christian Science movement, Mary Baker Eddy, provides for an annual meeting of The Mother Church each June (see Art. XIII, Sect.

The generous and steadily increasing contributions of branch churches, societies, and individual Christian Scientists are enabling The Mother Church to maintain and increase its wartime activities. These activities now extend to every part of the world where American or British Empire servicemen and servicewomen are engaged.

The things with which men concern themselves constitute their lives and predominantly influence their characters. Are we greatly concerned with the little things of daily experience, the pleasures and pains of the senses, the easy flow and sometimes disturbing ebb of personal relations? Do our own selfish desires, ambitions, and vanities, our local failures or successes, mainly concern us? Then our lives will remain circumscribed within these tyrant barriers; we shall continue to be eased or distraught by the chance good or ill fortune of a world to which spiritual direction and purpose are unknown.

Most of us are pretty busy doing something. In the human order mortals are engaged in a wide variety of interests.

Does it occur to many of us that the will of God is a happy thing to contemplate? It is. It is joy-bringing.

Probably many mortals have a feeling akin to Ben Jonson when he wrote, "O, for an engine to keep back all clocks. " Yet clocks do not make time.

In the parable of the wheat and tares the servants of the householder were told to let both grow together until the harvest, lest in rooting up the worthless, they destroy the other also. Does this mean a call to procrastination, to the acceptance of a process which must take time and ensure delay? Not if we take it in conjunction with another statement by Jesus.

Of all religious festivals, what is more thought-stirring, hope-inspiring, and joy-bringing than Easter? "For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. " So run the poetic lines in Solomon's Song.

The average individual for the most part takes for granted the world in which he lives; he is more interested in effect than cause, in his own reactions and achievements than in seeking reasons for them. He therefore does not expect to analyze, far less take masterful possession of, the events and circumstances that appear to make or mar his life.

Our human environment includes many things. Some are trees, grass, flowers, animals, buildings, and machines.