Right Activity

“KNOW, then, that you possess sovereign power to think and act rightly, and that nothing can dispossess you of this heritage and trespass on Love,” writes Mary Baker Eddy on page 3 of “Pulpit and Press.” Her statement might be considered as the last word in the Christian Scientist’s religious culture. Moses signified nothing else in presenting the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Through learning to understand and obey this commandment we learn to demonstrate the truth of our Leader’s words.

There are no exceptions to the rule that requires us to pass through the entire process of spiritual development, to prove our divine inheritance. The journey may be long, but each step must be taken, and sometimes retaken. Calmly, methodically, persistently pursued, however, each advance made with—not before or after —God, the journey will proceed harmoniously.

The novice in Christian Science is apt to imagine that he can quickly master the entire subject by “cramming”—recollections of school days and pending examinations leading him to suppose that he is treading on familiar ground. Instead, his earnest application carries him, after prolonged study, to a mount of revelation, where his spiritual sense takes a deep breath of the celestial, his inward vision glimpses an unexplored expanse, and he goes back to his books with the reflection, “Now, I see Christian Science in an entirely different light, and I must repeat my studies with this enlarged view.” After he has met with similar episodes again and again, the student finally concludes that any subject which has the ability to renew itself indefinitely, must require eternity to grasp it in its entirety.

It takes a while to understand, but. all students of Christian Science come at last to the place where they are able to comprehend that now they are working through and out of different phases of erroneous consciousness. “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent,” was the way the master Metaphysician put it. This awakening calms the impetuous striver and helps him to adjust himself to a gradual unfoldment, in contradistinction to the process of accretion, which he had originally supposed to be necessary. Poised, he is prepared to crown better thinking with better acting.

The great obstacles in the road of right thinking and right acting are catalogued by our Leader as “self-will, self-justification, and self-love” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 242). In business spheres and in church activities especially, the student is inclined to decide on what he wants to do, and to feel that he is not in his right place unless his ambition is gratified. How often do we ourselves think, or hear other students say, “I am not in my right place.” Who makes such a statement? Certainly not the image and likeness of God. The speaker is the same old mortal mind which Jesus denounced as a “liar.”

What greater deterrent to normal advancement could there be than the mortal mind ambition which carries us into making hasty, ill-advised moves? What becomes of our scientific poise when we allow ourselves to be borne away by human desires for earthly place and power? Could anything happen to us worse than the gratification of wishes dictated by self-will and self-love? A thousand times have we seen the writing on the wall: Lessons unlearned must be repeated! Well we know—even though we should like to disprove it—that no classes may be skipped in the school of eternal Life. Every plunge ahead, outside the straight and narrow path, only takes us in a roundabout way back to the lowly in Christ, on this plane of existence or some other, where we are forced to do over again what we have done badly, and to accomplish what we have overlooked and avoided. Eternity and spiritual life laugh at time and the dream of worldly life. We would only be selling our heritage for a mess of pottage, if we gained the whole world—and got out of step with God, so to speak.

Only mortal man is out of step with God; the spiritual, real man cannot get out of his right step or place. Each of us is a spiritual entity, with divinely maintained identity and individuality. “In Science man is governed by God, divine Principle, as numbers are controlled and proved by His laws,” Mrs. Eddy declares on page 318 of Science and Health. Could any one imagine the number 4 getting out of its right place, no longer subject to the laws which originally provided for its use in the system of mathematics? Could any one imagine that 4, through its own delinquencies or the faults of others, could ever get into a situation where it would no longer be divisible by 2, or where its square would not be 16? Such a state of affairs is inconceivable. Yet men who believe that man is the highest idea of God are often led by material evidences to think that their identity, place, and government in the spiritual universe are less secure and less logical than those of number 4.

If one’s physical environment is not what he desires it to be, if his work is far from his liking and his emolument insufficient, Christian Science teaches him that the discordant conditions represent wrong methods of thinking about himself and his surroundings, which he should and can change. Indulging the utter uselessness of self-pity and self-condemnation, so constantly resorted to by the uninstructed, will serve only to make the discords more real to him; while he looks upon self-justification as a useless absurdity. He understands why the discords cannot be neglected, avoided, or smoothed over; and the rules which he has been taught show him how to set about the task of painstakingly seeking out and destroying each wrong belief. Throughout his fight, he is encouraged by the realization that each conquest is a step taken onwards, a lesson rightly learned, another proof of his “sovereign power to think and act rightly.”

Does discouragement ever loom large? Then it is well to remember that we are striving for spiritual, not material, progress; that all our fellows must sometime join in the same endeavor; that every bit of progress which we rightly make will endure; and that the goal is so glorious that it spurred Jesus on to sacrifices at which we may even look aghast. Possibly the lower grades of the course are the least pleasant, but they are fundamental, as well as elementary; and we are exercising our “sovereign power to think and act rightly” only when we are striving to learn all they have to teach us. If we had no lessons to learn just where we find ourselves in the school of mortal existence, we should be wrestling with other problems; and we shall go on to others as soon as we have won the right to do so. Our seeming surroundings change with the thoughts that build them. Mortal joys and sorrows, pains and pleasures, are fictions of dream-life. Can we be deceived by a mortal sense of lack, when we know that Truth has sustained us through the eternal yesterday, and must as surely bear us on through the eternal to-morrow?

Could any one logically argue that God had at any time stopped maintaining identity and individuality, and that He had canceled the laws of man’s being? Most certainly not. Man’s identity and individuality, his place and purpose and the laws of his being, are unchangeable and eternal; and Christian Scientists are striving after their full revelation.