Confronted in daily experience with doubts, fears, difficulties and failures, with no certain way of overcoming them and all shrouded in uncertainty; with chance and accident seemingly real, and the good we so much desire apparently dethroned on every side,—we sometimes wonder what is the purpose of an existence which seems devoid of certain good. This is a practical age, because things and theories are being judged by their usefulness, by the help they give in freeing us from the uncertainties and discomforts we experience in our search for good. We do not seem, as yet, to have caught more than a glimpse of the great underlying truth, that the ideal is always the practical, when its Principle is understood and intelligently applied. This may seem a startling statement in the light of the fact that the ideal as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount has ever been discarded as impractical in business and in political and social affairs.
The world readily admits that unvarying honesty of purpose and conduct is ideal, but it is not yet ready to concede that common honesty is practical in our industrial, commercial, social, and political relations. So, too, the world readily admits that a pure life, clean habits, noble impulses, and deeds of kindness, are ideal, but it does not yet think they can be maintained in human experience; and the difficulty in all these instances lies in the fact that we have no clear comprehension of the line of demarcation between the real and the unreal. Christian Science has come to make this potent truth clear, to prove that the true way is the only real way, and the only practical way of doing anything. This revelation, with its clear discrimination between the true and the false, the actual and the seeming, will yet bring to humanity an infinite blessing.
Christian Science affirms that underneath all the shifting and uncertain conditions about us there rest the everlasting laws of God, good, in whom we "live, and move, and have our being," and that all divine ideas are clad in a robe of consistency, without seam or rent, forming one infinite unity of good. Spiritual laws are real; they are "the same yesterday, and today, and forever;" hence they are the only laws that can be applied to the redemption of daily experience. "Understanding is the line of demarcation between the real and the unreal" (Science and Health, p. 505), and it is necessary for us to perceive this "line of demarcation" if we would make the ideal practical.
