THE initial word of St. Paul's injunction to the Philippians, "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus," is a small key, but it opens the door to a broad and exceedingly fruitful field of thought. No Scripture writer has done more than the great Tarsan to illustrate and emphasize the strenuousness of the human struggle involved in the overcoming of evil, and yet he has made it luminously clear that all efficient doing is to be identified with consent of heart and will to divinely accomplished facts. In a word, to give adequate consent to the sovereignty of divine Mind is all that we are asked to do, or can do, whether for the least or for the greatest end; and the recognition and enforcement of this truth constitutes one of the most significant features of the teaching of Christian Science.
It may be truly said that an attitude of consent is the distinctive mortal mood, but this is the willing acceptance not of that which is, but of that which seems; it is a yielding to the appeals of materiality, to appetite and impulse, the seductions of the flesh and of the world. In contrast with all this, St. Paul's counsel is that we consent to the verity of being, to divine Mind, its guidance and government. The secret of effective living is thus seen to be the acquirement and exercise of that self-command which makes it possible for us to honor the declarations and demands of spiritual sense, to rejoice alway in the Lord.
In one sense this is no new doctrine, for while still subject, and in large degree, perchance, to fall into temptation, Christian believers, as a body, do not mean to consent to sin; they sincerely condemn wrong-doing, and self the wrong-doer, in so far as what they think of as sin has been indulged in; nevertheless, these same people maintain a marked attitude of consent to much which the Master certainly classified as "the fruits of sin," namely sickness, decrepitude, and death. Such consent is frequently expressed in the declaration that these things pertain to God's government of men, and this despite the fact that Christ Jesus refused all consent thereto, and publicly annulled them as having no right to be, because not of God. All this can but distinctly tend to weaken and defeat the endeavor to resist sin, for we cannot consistently condemn the tree so long as we think we are profiting, or may profit, by its fruits.
