JOHN says: "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death." Recent study of this passage brought out in strong relief the fact that by far the most wonderful part of the healing I have experienced in Christian Science is this, that divine Love has found an entrance to my heart and is teaching me to give out love. This is the more wonderful since, when Christian Science was first brought to my attention, my camp was pitched high up on the side of the mountain of selfishness. I was afraid to dwell in the valley where the needs of others compelled attention, because my thought of giving was strongly associated with impoverishment. In fact, there was very little desire to give in any direction, money, time, service, interest in another's welfare, kind thought, or charitable interpretation of another's motives and acts.
I sought the help of Christian Science from a wholly selfish motive, having no thought of contributing anything more than my own problem. It would be difficult indeed to imagine a thought less receptive to its demands, and yet the merest suggestion of a change of view-point caused alarm and aroused a determined and vigorous resistance, for the reason that I could see nothing to gain and everything to lose thereby. But "the superiority of spiritual power over material resistance" (Science and Health, p. 134) was again proved, for, as the result of Christian Science treatment, attendance upon church services, and the study of the text-book, the "god of this world" has been dethroned and brotherly love is being enthroned in its place in my consciousness.
Progress is naturally made along the line of least resistance, and it was a long time before I began to yield or surrender my wholly material sense of what the world designates as success, power, and possession. Time was when personal gain was the one object in life, and I measured success and power solely in terms of money or its equivalent; business was a sharp, competitive struggle, in which the gain, advancement, or success of one was contingent upon another's loss, retardation, or defeat. Little by little, as I studied the text-book, the significance of the teaching that true success and power are dependent upon the triumph of Truth, and that this means the triumph of good, has dawned upon my thought, and brought me liberation from the belief that giving impoverishes or that withholding enriches; that money, or anything else, wrung or wrested from another to that other's loss, can really benefit the one who may seem temporarily to profit thereby; or that accumulation and retention (i.e., withholding from others) is the foundation of true possession.
