"There is but one way to heaven, harmony," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 242 of Science and Health, "and Christ in divine Science shows us this way. It is to know no other reality—to have no other consciousness of life—than good, God and His reflection, and to rise superior to the so-called pain and pleasure of the senses. . . . The finger-posts of divine Science show the way our Master trod, and require of Christians the proof which he gave, instead of mere profession. We may hide spiritual ignorance from the world, but we can never succeed in the Science and demonstration of spiritual good through ignorance or hypocrisy." In these few sentences Mrs. Eddy has sketched in sharp perspective the course of the true Christian Scientist. It is a severe test of one's purpose to demand of him that he rule out of his thinking all that is unlike good, and that his manner of living shall attest by his imperviousness to the allurements of sense the genuineness of his profession. Yet there is no other way, if he would win the heavenly guerdon.
The great Teacher knew only too well the temptations, the illusions of sense, yes, even the persecutions which awaited his followers in this world, and by precept and parable he brought home the lesson of endurance,—willingness to bear the cross if one would wear the palm of victory over sin, disease, and death. In the first enthusiasm of their new found hope and faith, while he was with them to mark the way, the disciples were eager to do his bidding. But what of the seventy who came back from their first mission rejoicing that even the evil spirits were subject unto them! Was it after Jesus had given them what they considered "an hard saying" that "many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him"? It was the testing time of the kind of soil into which the good seed had been cast. The sower went forth to sow: but only the seed which fell on good ground endured and brought forth a hundredfold. Well might he who knew the thoughts of those who gathered about him exclaim, "Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."
By far the majority of those who come into Christian Science have been delivered from sorrow or suffering through its ministry. In joy and gratitude for having found a panacea for all their ills, they enter upon a new life, a life which, while not exempt from tribulations, nevertheless offers deliverance therefrom through self-abnegation and obedience to the behests of divine Mind. They have enlisted under a Leader who through many years followed the rugged path which leads from sense to Soul. Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing, working, watching, and praying, she ran "with patience" the race that she would have every soldier of the cross run, a course which permits no loitering by the way, no side trips into flower bedecked fields that promise an easier, more inviting pathway to the journey's end only to lure the pilgrim into thorny thickets and bogs of despondency and doubt, but a straightforward following of the one way.
