It is absolutely essential to our highest happiness and success that we learn how to work out our own salvation; which must be both complete and universal. It is just as needful for the sober-headed business man as for the Christian Science practitioner to learn how to work out the problem of salvation. It is just as incumbent upon the one as upon the other to glorify God in his daily life. It is just as needful for the one as for the other to think right and to live right, to be pure and good.
The work of salvation is an individual work, and it is the mission of Christian Science to show us how it is to be done, and to insist upon its being performed. The command of Scripture, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," will seem neither mysterious nor irksome to us when understood in the light of Christian Science, that it is neither more nor less than right thinking and right living. It is needless to say that no one can do our thinking and living for us; but we may be shown how best to do our own work. The teachers and practitioners of Christian Science are not working out the salvation of other people for them, but they are pointing the way through Christ. They are revealing to honest and sincere seekers for truth the path which leads to the demonstration of the effective presence of the Principle of being. Any one who is thinking scientifically, who is earnestly striving to lead a correct life, is in a position to help his fellow-man, but not to do his work for him.
Science and Health tells us that "God will heal the sick through man, whenever man is governed by God' (p. 495). Man is controlled by God only when he is thinking or expressing right thoughts or ideas, and such thoughts constitute the effectual fervent prayer of the righteous, which availeth much. The Christian Scientist knows that such prayer heals sickness in the same way that it destroys sin; and for this reason it is bringing health and happiness to the whole world. The healing of sickness and sin gives us a glimpse of the ideal man, the human is transfigured, but, like Peter, James, and John, we must descend to the foot of the mountain and, step by step, work up to the summit of pure spirituality. We win only what we earn, and only the laborer is worthy of his hire.
