Christian Scientists are persecuted even as all other religious denominations have been, since ever the primitive Christians, “of whom the world was not worthy.” We err in thinking the object of vital Christianity is only the bequeathing of itself to the coming centuries. The successive utterances of reformers are essential to its propagation. The magnitude of its meaning forbids headlong haste, and the consciousness which is most imbued struggles to articulate itself.
Christian Scientists are practically non-resistants; they are too occupied with doing good, observing the Golden Rule, to retaliate or to seek redress; they are not quacks, giving birth to nothing and death to all, — but they are leaders of a reform in religion and in medicine, and they have no craft that is in danger.
Even religion and therapeutics need regenerating. Philanthropists, and the higher class of critics in theology and materia medica, recognize that Christian Science kindles the inner genial life of a man, destroying all lower considerations. No man or woman is roused to the establishment of a new-old religion by the hope of ease, pleasure, or recompense, or by the stress of the appetites and passions. And no emperor is obeyed like the man “clouting his own cloak” — working alone with God, yea, like the clear, far-seeing vision, the calm courage, and the great heart of the unselfed Christian hero.
I counsel Christian Scientists under all circumstances to obey the Golden Rule, and to adopt Pope's axiom: “An honest, sensible, and well-bred man will not insult me, and no other can.” The sensualist and world-wor-
