The goal of every sincere Christian Scientist is perfect demonstration over sin, sickness, and death. We are taught that these are unreal, but it is our task to prove their unreality, and the qualifications necessary to this end are ours by man's natural and divine inheritance. The term "sincere" is here used with a purpose. Carlyle declared that "sincerity—a deep, great, genuine sincerity—is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic." In its highest sense sincerity is spiritual; it is a divine quality, excluding all that is false and feeble and vacillating and ignoble, and is an indispensable factor in the search for truth. With the unfoldment of truth there comes to many the spiritual intuition which detects the subtleness of mortal mind, a condition of thought which is alien to all that is pure and holy and which needs to be transformed by the renewing influences of the spirit of Love.
It was this spiritual insight, the concomitant of whole-heartedness and loyal devotion, which enabled Jesus to read the thoughts of those around him. He did not welcome all who came to him. There were those who were not ready to take up the cross: they were actuated by motives that would not stand the Christ-test— motives which were tainted by the desire for personal ends of a varied character rather than the glory of God. The lesson is one which is still applicable. Human nature has not changed; only in these days we have a clearer, because more spiritual and scientific, knowledge of what the human will can and cannot do, and how utterly worthless it is in the solution of those problems of life which every man must sooner or later face.
It may be safely laid down as an axiom that no good can be won without perfect sincerity of heart. This may be a commonplace; but are we conscious of what it means? St. Paul speaks of "beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord;" but in order to do this, there is one condition: we are to come "with open face,"—with pure desire, with unity of purpose, with uplifted look, with that true concentration which, penetrating beyond the mists of doubt and fear, confident that the God who is Love does not leave His children without help, goes right into the heart of the unseen and finds rest. Is it not the experience of most of us that there are times when we catch wonderful glimpses of Truth, when we see the real and know its power, when the light breaks through the clouds of sense testimony? Those are our inspired moments—and how wonderfully encouraging they are! Are they not a foretaste of the joys to come, as we go on "from glory to glory," a proof that our awakening in His likeness shall be purely spiritual? "The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth."
