We not unfrequently hear new students of Christian Science express discouragement because some discordant condition does not yield readily to their treatment; but we all need to learn that these problems are the test of our real understanding of Truth, and are as necessary to the attainment of a demonstrable knowledge of Christian Science, as the sums we had to do at school were necessary to a correct and practical knowledge of arithmetic. Through demonstrating the unreality of these conditions we reach a higher understanding of the infinitude of Good, and make just that much progress toward man' s rightful dominion. The exactness required of us by divine Principle in working out our deliverance from physical and moral error, through Christian Science, does not vary a hair's breadth any more than it does in mathematics. In the Christian Science text-book, Science and Health, we read, "Divine Principle never pardons our sins or mistakes till they are corrected" (p. 11).
Take an illustration from the work of an accountant. At regular intervals he is required to prove the correctness of his work by means of a trial balance; if his work has been rightly done the books will balance; if they do not he knows there has been a mistake; there is something about his work that is not true, and that the only way to restore the harmony, or correctness, of his books is to discover and correct the mistake. To complain of the hard work this may entail avails nothing; even the discovery of the troublesome error does not release him; but when he corrects it, it has ceased to exist, and is unreal in the most literal sense of the word.
And so it is with our human life-work; we are frequently called upon to prove the correctness or truthfulness of our work, or thought; and as even one cent on the wrong side will throw the accountant's books out of balance, so what may seem the most trivial of faults, if uncorrected, will sound a note of discord in our sense of life. Jesus referred to this absolute, unyielding exactness required by Truth when he said, "every idle word that men shall speak they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment." The apparently petty mistakes in the day's thinking and doing do not disappear with the day, though seemingly forgotten; they remain in the individual's consciousness to bring forth fruit after their kind, until destroyed. The accountant's mistake of one cent may pass unnoticed, but the balancing time will show it up as surely as if it were a thousand dollars, and the standard of mathematical truth requires its correction just as imperatively. Why should we wish the standard of Christian Science, or right living, to be less exact than the science of numbers?
