Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/277

Rh You may condemn evil in the abstract without harming any one or your own moral sense, but condemn persons seldom, if ever. Improve every opportunity to correct sin through your own perfectness. When error strives to be heard above Truth, let the “still small voice” produce God's phenomena. Meet dispassionately the raging element of individual hate and counteract its most gigantic falsities.

The moral abandon of hating even one's enemies excludes goodness. Hate is a moral idiocy let loose for one's own destruction. Unless withstood, the heat of hate burns the wheat, spares the tares, and sends forth a mental miasma fatal to health, happiness, and the morals of mankind, — and all this only to satiate its loathing of love and its revenge on the patience, silence, and lives of saints. The marvel is, that at this enlightened period a respectable newspaper should countenance such evil tendencies.

Millions may know that I am the Founder of Christian Science. I alone know what that means.

The report that I prefer to have a man, rather than a woman, for First Reader in The Church of Christ, Scientist, I desire to correct. My preference lies with the individual best fitted to perform this important function. If both the First and Second Readers are my students, then without reference to sex I should prefer that student who is most spiritually-minded. What our churches need is that devout, unselfed quality of thought which spiritualizes the congregation.