UPON Christian Scientists is laid the task of striving to upbuild God's kingdom in the earth. Christ Jesus said of himself and of his works. "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil;" and so those who name themselves his disciples must in the measure of their right endeavor seeing that they come not to destroy, but to be about constructive work. This is a lesson slowly learned, perhaps; for the zeal and haste attending early experience in reformative work would overthrow' apparent wrongs before individual character grows able always to sustain wholly righteous ways and means. Christianity as Christ Jesus taught and lived it, as the Scriptures expound it, and as Mrs. Eddy through Christian Science reenforces it, unfolds grace within wherewith to undo evils without. And until individual thoughts and lives are thus cleansed through spiritual understanding, no amount of opposition to persons is of any avail.
To be sure, we do grow away from evil by seeing its enormity; and anything which honestly unmasks error has its place in the processes of reformation. But it is also true that only a genuine acquaintance with the uses of good, only the love for good that makes evil wholly unattractive, can altogether uncover and remove, according to the law of God, specific personal evils or lessen the indifference to the general and oft-excused evils at large. So we come logically to admit that the constructive work which quickens individual righteousness—or rightness—must precede any permanent disappearance of evil; and that it is through the coming of the real and the right that present-day living is to be redeemed.
Christian Science brings to its students the inward and quickening understanding of Truth which resolves what is known of evil into evil belief. It urges its follower to destroy his own habit of believing evil by the direct mental process of refusing to fear evil, to desire it, or otherwise uphold it. And primarily it gives him a correct basis for this refusal to support evil by revealing to him how God is all powerful and ever present and why evil cannot withstand this divine power and presence. Beginning in this way to purify individuals, and calling each one of us to the task of making our own mental points of view Christlike, Christian Science will in time make God's presence so manifest in the earth that evil must cease its unholy utterances.
