One of the privileges of my job is that once a year, at Fall Convocation, I have a chance to say a few words to the entire College community about a subject that seems timely and important. It was Bill Clinton who gave me the idea for this year’s topic.

Back in January, a correspondent for The New York Times interviewed the President at the White House. Among other things, he asked Mr. Clinton about future threats to American security. His answer was striking and has stayed with me. The President said he believed that it is "highly likely" – his words: ‘‘highly likely" – that a terrorist group will launch or threaten a germ or chemical attack on American soil within the next few years.

Politicians and national security experts have been talking for years about the theoretical possibility of such an attack. What struck me about the President’s answer was the sense of imminence it conveyed, consistent with the current assessment of the U.S. intelligence community.

His answer comes during a year that – by virtue of being the last in the century and the last in the millennium – already begs deep thinking about where history has brought us and where it seems to be leading us. It hints at a future that, for whatever good it may hold, could also hold some serious dangers. This is important for all of us in the human race. It is uniquely important for the good folks sitting in this auditorium – and for the thousands of other Christian Scientists around the world – because of what we can bring, because of what we must bring, and because of what we alone can bring to the new millennium, as Christian metaphysicians, to dissipate such dangers. This is the subject I’d like to devote the next few minutes to.

Before the last century turned, Mary Baker Eddy made a timely observation - one of many, to be sure. "Science only," she said, "can explain the incredible good and evil elements now coming to the surface" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 83:6-7). Taking stock at the end of this century, we have plenty of examples of our own of incredible good and incredible evil.

On the "incredible good" side of the ledger we have what is undoubtedly the single most important contribution of the millennium now ending – apart from the advent of Christian Science – namely, a growing worldwide conviction that democratic government, the rule of law, respect for human rights, and free and competitive economic systems are in the best interests of mankind. It took humanity a long time to figure this out. It took a lot of wars, a lot of human suffering, and a lot of enlightened thinkers along the way to get us here. These are certainly trends that the prayers of Christian Scientists have helped to reinforce and must continue to reinforce.

Entries on the "incredible evil" side of the ledger are hinted by President Clinton’s answer to The New York Times reporter. I don’t raise the subject of terrorism to be sensational, but because it epitomizes the kind of threat that mortal mind insists must inevitably co-exist with the kind of human progress we see all around us. And here’s the point: the human evidence that makes the President’s warning so plausible comprises the very error that Truth alone, invoked in the prayers of Christian Scientists, can annihilate.

The human evidence is that advances in the world’s thinking – the clarification of ethics and values – aren’t keeping up with advances in human technology. And the human evidence is that third-world poverty, ethnic tensions, and environmental decline – operating independently or in concert – are nourishing the feelings of despair and hopelessness that, among many other things, prompt acts of terrorism.

I interviewed a good number of terrorists as a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor in the Middle East. One of my regular sources – until he was assassinated – was the architect of the attack that killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich. Another masterminded the hijacking and destruction of two Western airliners in Jordan. Another was initially implicated in the bombing of Pan Am flight #103. Another planned acts of terrorism against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon. None disputed this essential cause-and-effect relationship. They and many others I interviewed all said that it was the despair caused by poverty, frustrated nationalism, and political powerlessness that drove them to commit such desperate acts.

If these are the claims of mortal mind, then we have an important job, and that is to meet them. This is one of the privileges of being a Christian Scientist. But if you’re like I was for a long time, you’re probably asking yourself, "How could the thinking of a few hundred people living in a tiny village in Illinois possibly have any bearing on the problems of people living half a world away, in places like Africa or Asia?"

There are two ways to think about this. One is by faith. If we’ve prayed – if we’ve invoked the Truth and seen the results in our individual lives – then there’s no reason whatever to doubt that prayer on the same basis will have the same transforming effect on our collective circumstances, even if we’re too far away from the object of our prayers to see the actual results. As Mrs. Eddy says, the lesser demonstrations "prove the greater, as the product of three multiplied by three, equalling nine, proves conclusively that three times three duodecillions must be nine duodecillions . . ." (Science and Health, p. 108:14).

But here’s good news: We don’t have to operate on the basis of faith alone. We have an abundance of evidence that tangibly demonstrates the effect that earnest prayer – offered by earnest Christian Scientists – has had on the lives of people far removed geographically from their own day-to-day experience.

Take the example of a friend of mine. He’s a Christian Science practitioner who lives in the United Kingdom. One day he was impelled to pray in response to a crisis that was unfolding in Africa. "I lifted up my thought to know that the Christ was there, meeting that human need," he told me later. Within days, he received three phone calls from people in the region – from Africa – asking for help. None of the callers knew him. None were known by him. And none were known to each other. They were simply responding, individually, to his outreaching thought, and their needs were met. As he wrote later: "This illustrated [to me] the universal power of prayer and the omniscience of divine Mind" (Robert H. Mitchell, "Going into the Practice," The Christian Science Journal, Vol. 82, No. 10, October 1964, pp.510-512).

Decades earlier, Mary Baker Eddy had written to her church: "From the interior of Africa to the utmost parts of the earth, the sick and the heavenly homesick or hungry hearts are calling on me for help, and I am helping them" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 147:8-30). A remarkable statement from a woman whose geographical horizons rarely extended beyond two small states in New England. Her mental horizons were unlimited.

Here’s another example. It concerns Herbert Hoover, who was President of the United States between 1929 and 1933. At one point during his term he was asked to deliver an address at the unveiling of a Revolutionary War monument in North Carolina. A few days before the event, a Federal agent visited the site and there got word of a plot to assassinate the President. He was a new Christian Scientist, and before returning to Washington he placed a call to two Christian Science practitioners, sisters, who resided together in North Carolina. He asked them to pray while the President was in the state.

The next week, President Hoover came to North Carolina. During the four hours he was in the state the two practitioners prayed nonstop. At one point they talked. When they compared notes they both acknowledged that they were almost overwhelmed by a crushing sense of burden – a burden "so heavy and cruel," one of the practitioners later wrote, "that it seemed as if no human being could endure it." Said one to the other: "Can it be that this is the load our presidents have to bear?" (Elizabeth Earl Jones, "The ‘Great White Throne,’" Christian Science Sentinel, October 6, 1943, pp. 1753-56).

So they prayed to lift the load. They prayed to know that the government was on God’s shoulders, not on man’s. They prayed to know, in the words of Isaiah, that God was undoing "the heavy burdens . . . to let the oppressed go free. . . ." They prayed to know that man’s only responsibility was to joyfully reflect the one Mind. And they continued to pray until the sense of burden began to lift – until there was no load left. They prayed until President Hoover left the state at the end of a successful – and safe – visit.

Here’s the really amazing part. Two days later they read the newspaper. It contained an article with a Washington dateline describing the President’s trip. It contained this quote from President Hoover’s White House press secretary: "The President says that while on this trip he felt the lifting of a crushing mental load which descended upon him when he took the oath of office, and from which he had experienced no relief until now."

Mind you, these were two Christian Science practitioners who had never met the President. They were not known to the President. But the quiet, unheralded, earnest, unselfish work that these two women did protected the President of the United States and lifted from his shoulders – for the very first time in his presidency – the enormous load he carried as the nation’s Chief Executive. It’s an extraordinary story.

Let’s take one other example. It’s from the experience of Mrs. Eddy herself. Late in 1904, a bitter and costly war erupted between Japan and Russia. Mrs. Eddy knew that the prayers of Christian Scientists could help. So, in June 1905, she sent this message to the Annual Meeting of the Mother Church: "I request that every member of The Mother Church . . . pray each day for the amicable settlement of the war between Russia and Japan; and pray that God bless that great nation and those islands of the sea with peace and prosperity" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 279:22).

After two weeks, she requested that the members of her church cease the "special prayer" she had called for. She evidently felt that the needed work had been done and that all that was left to do was to await God’s disposal of events. Within three weeks, representatives from Japan and Russia gathered for peace talks, and the war ended. The other remarkable thing is that the peace conference – which earned a Nobel Peace Prize for President Theodore Roosevelt, who acted as mediator – was convened in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Russo-Japanese War, fought thousands of miles from U.S. shores, half a world away, was settled exactly 40 miles from Mrs. Eddy’s home, in Concord, New Hampshire (Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority, p. 256).

So, you see the vast possibilities here. You see the certain, unmistakable cause-and-effect relationship between the prayers of Christian Scientists and the course of human events.

The thing about Mrs. Eddy is that she was totally convinced that the Science she discovered could and would transform human history. She describes Christian Science as a "mighty impulse for good" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 10:5-6) and says that its first premise – that there is only one Mind – fully understood by Christian Scientists, meaning you and me, would unify men and nations, equalize the sexes, end wars, and annihilate every kind of evil: social, civil, criminal, political and religious (Science and Health, p. 340:23).

It’s worth noting that her writings specifically address, with statements of truth, the forms of human evil that seemed to be prevalent in her day: imperialism; monopoly; racial discrimination; inequalities between the sexes; industrial slavery; even monopoly power, or what she called "insufficient freedom of honest competition" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 266:6).

These are some of the things she described in 1900 as "imminent dangers confronting the coming century" (Ibid., p. 266:3-4). And she was convinced that every one of these societal problems was ameliorated after the discovery of Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy confronted the "imminent dangers" of her era. She expected us to confront the imminent dangers of our own. That’s why she gave us The Christian Science Monitor. She expected Christian Scientists to use the Monitor to identify the errors that need to be met.

She says Christian Scientists have to "expose . . . the claims of evil," but at the same time to realize "no reality" in evil (Science and Health, p. 447:20-22). This is the key. The exposing part is important. But exposing without giving reality. That’s why we can look without fear on President Clinton’s prudent warning about the threat of terrorism. But we can do so only if we are honestly and earnestly engaged in the work of recognizing that, since there is only one Mind, man cannot be governed by the hatred or the fear or the sometimes understandable frustration that would lead to terrorist acts. And this knowing will purify the motives of men and women everywhere. It actually will. You see, this is getting to the very root of the problem, which is what Christian Science does and why Christian Scientists are so crucial.

The truth is that learning to have a larger outlook on life is why we’re at Principia. The truth is that being informed about, sensitive towards, and responsive to the needs of humanity is what Principia is in business to train its students to do. The truth is that humanity needs you, probably more than you can realize just now. It needs what you can bring, reasoning out from a spiritual basis, more than ever before. This is why what we do together here is so crucially important. This is why the lives you will lead as graduates of Principia – or, much more to the point, as engaged, practicing, unselfish, clear-thinking Christian Scientists – are certain to have a profound effect on the course of the new millennium.

Now, all of you are playing soccer, or taking a chemistry course, or performing in a play, or whatever. Just bear in mind as you do these things that this isn’t the main point. As important as these things are, they are just the opportunities we have at hand at the moment to develop the qualities – the discipline, the metaphysical clarity – to deal with what is the main issue. And the main issue is to heal the sins of the world – the hatreds, the cruelties, the mad ambitions that try to hold the world in thrall – and to lift from mankind all the heartache, all of the sadness, that seem to weigh so heavily. I guess in this respect our mission is no less clear – in its way, no less important – than the Master’s.

Mrs. Eddy’s message to her class of 1889 has been quoted so often that it risks becoming overused, if that’s possible. Its point is nevertheless essential - namely, that we, here, in this room, are enough to change the world if we are of one Mind (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 279:27). And what does that require? Nothing more than the humility and unselfishness implied in Mrs. Eddy’s hymn: "My prayer, some daily good to do, to Thine, for Thee . . ." (Christian Science Hymnal, #253). That’s what will make the difference in the new millennium.

As for this much-talked-about millennium, let’s think about it the way Mrs. Eddy did, as just a "stage of mental advancement going on since ever time was. Its impetus, accelerated by the advent of Christian Science, is marked," she says, "and will increase till all men shall know Him (divine Love) from the least to the greatest, and one God and the brotherhood of man shall be known and acknowledged throughout the earth" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 239:27).

Thank you.