A proximate result of Christianly Scientific living must of necessity be a better, higher, and purer humanhood. Unless this be true, we misread the Bible, and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, as well as all the writings and admonitions of our Teacher and Leader. We cannot conceive it possible to reach a spiritual state except through improved human conditions as precedent thereto. Honesty, truthfulness, meekness, gentleness, loving-kindness, sympathy of the true sort,— all these pertain to true humanhood, and where they are lacking, Christianity and spirituality are lacking.
Much of Jesus' teaching was addressed to a better and higher humanity. His injunctions to love the neighbor, practically applied in human life, would assuredly lead to ideal human conditions; although their ultimate goal must be the spiritual estate. But how shall this spiritual estate be attained other than through the gradual processes of development which bring with them improved and constantly improving human conditions? Happier and more harmonious earthly environments must surely be the precursor of the heavenly.
One of the most deplorable states of self-deception, or self-mesmerism, is that which leads to the supposition that by a sudden intellectual or mental transformation, or by mere verbal declaration, one can brush aside all material obstacles and leap at a single bound from material trammels to spiritual freedom. Such an one is but piling up wrath against the day of wrath. There is nothing more strongly emphasized in Jesus' teachings, and those of Science and Health, than that fact. Soon or late must the victim of this self-deception drop from his falsely erected pinnacle, retrace his steps, and through the suffering of purgation and gradual growth out of sense into Soul, ascend the mountain of spiritual attainment. To fancy that while he is yet in the valley below the mountain's base, he has scaled its grand heights, is indeed a mischievous delusion. This, however, by no means implies that he must not set his spiritual goal high, even the highest,— that dazzling height embraced in Jesus' remarkable command, "Be ye perfect, even as the Father which is in heaven is perfect." That perfection is the grand finale, not the first step nor the intermediate steps, and is attained only by treading the "thorn-road," which the Master trod.
