AS awakened thought begins to grasp the teachings of Christian Science and we try to put them into practice, we soon discern the vast difference between the realities of being and the lives that we are living, and there springs up a great longing to free ourselves from the fetters of materiality, that we may enter at once upon a purely spiritual life. Though we may be very earnest and sincere in our efforts to accomplish this, yet there lies right here the danger of a grave mistake. The human mind is always prone to run to extremes, and many a beginner in Christian Science has learned by sad experience that it is very easy to undertake to go too fast in what seems to his ignorant zeal a wholly wise and commendable reaction against things material.
The consequences arising from this mistake are twofold. It brings to him who makes it an unnecessarily troubled experience, while thought is constantly disturbed by discouragement and self-condemnation and confused by the frequent and apparently unavoidable compromises with error. It also brings, to those who are watching the progress of such an extremist, and who have no understanding of Christian Science, a sense that this Science must be destructive rather than constructive in its tendencies. As he sees many harmless and innocent things, that seem to be helpful and necessary under the present conditions of daily life, neglected and condemned, while apparently nothing better is put in their place, it is not surprising that antagonism possesses his thought, and that he contrasts unfavorably the lives of such extremists with the lives of those who neither know nor desire Christian Science.
When mistakes of this kind occur, it can easily be learned through the study of our text-book, Science and Health, that they are not due to the teaching of Christian Science, but only to the impatience, unwise ambition, and lack of understanding of the individual. In confirmation of this statement, attention may well be directed to the three following quotations from Science and Health, chosen from the many loving admonitions that would be pertinent here: "Emerge gently from matter into Spirit.... Come naturally into Spirit... as the result of spiritual growth." "Abandon so fast as practical the material, and... work out the spiritual which determines the outward and actual." "God requires perfection, but not until the battle between Spirit and flesh is fought and the victory won" (pp. 485, 254).
