Putting the brakes on the arms race

"This material world is even now becoming the arena for conflicting forces. On one side there will be discord and dismay; on the other side there will be Science and peace." n1 Though these words of Mary Baker Eddy's n2 were written about a hundred years ago, the present bears out more than ever before their prophetic truth. Certainly one aspect of the polarization mentioned in the accompanying interview is, on the one hand, the chilling prospect of nuclear devastation, and on the other, a growing perception of the interrelatedness of humanity as a whole to the earth and its creatures, whose well-being is increasingly recognized as bound with our own. The need to slow down and if possible reverse the world's stockpiling of nuclear weapons has never been more apparent.

n1 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,m p. 96.

n2 Mrs. Eddy is the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science.

In the Bible, power and authority are held ultimately to rest not with arms but with God, the infinitely sovereign Mind. In the universe created by divine Mind there are not multiple superpowers motivated by conflicting aims and ideologies. There is the one supreme, all-motivating power, God. This fact takes on greater immediacy when we realize that there are not two universes, one serene and the other either strife-torn or straining to prolong a lull in hostilities it terms peace. Mrs. Eddy unequivocally sets this misconception straight when she states in Science and Health:m "All reality is in God and His creation, harmonious and eternal. That which He creates is good, and He makes all that is made." n3

n3 Science and Health,m p. 472.

Prayer is not so much a matter of attempting through spiritual means to stitch back together a tenuous rapport between hostile parties as it is a revealing of the harmonious and eternal reality already present. The proliferation of fearsome weapons and the breakdown of cooperation in restraining their manufacture and deployment are measures of how urgently our perception of that reality is needed.

The outcome may be a relaxing of hostilities, as occurred not long ago between the United States and the People's Republic of China. But such constructive changes will be permanent only in the degree that they arise not from a dread of annihilation or from political naivete but from the stirring that Mind's insistence on its own irresistible supremacy causes in human thought. This may emerge as mankind's awakening to the senselessness of unrestrainedly pursuing military dominance and to the central importance of moral power in securing a nation's prosperity.

Christ Jesus said, "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." n4 Mrs. Eddy, in her spiritual interpretation of the Lord's Prayer, follows this with: " Enable us to know, -- as in heaven, so on earth, -- God is omnipotent, supreme.m " n5 As we are enabled by prayer to know God's omnipotence -- and to base our reasoning and lives on it -- the world will feel and see God's power, too.

n4 Matthew 6:10.

n5 Science and Health,m p. 17.

DAILY BIBLE VERSE He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. Psalms 46:9