At the beginning of what men call the New Year all the world teems with good resolutions. It is looked upon as a general accounting time. As mankind glance back over the failures and disappointments, the mistakes and discomfitures of the past, it is scarcely strange that they should turn to that which they imagine will prevent the possibility of a repetition of such distresses. To this end they make unlimited resolutions which they believe will produce success.
Men have always—and rightly— desired to escape from a recurrence of past difficulties, and they have undertaken to do this by making all sorts of righteous resolves to avoid old mistakes, to abstain from former sins, and to put into practice all the known virtues. With a fresh courage born of a contemplation of such good purposes, they have started out in the exultant hope that the New Year would bring them only triumph and success. Soon they have found their courage flagging, their hope waning, their new inspiration lacking, and have all too frequently settled down into a state either of dogged indifference or of stubborn purpose to win at any hazard. Like all other human planning, resolutions, unless founded upon an intelligent understanding of divine Principle, are made but to be broken. The moment one bases a resolve, however righteous its seeming intent, on something less than a correct apprehension of the perfect guidance and government of God, he has but built on sand. For one to believe that he is the author of his own circumstances and can control them through his own purposes and activities apart from dependence on divine Principle, is to have erected a mental structure which he will eventually see disappear into its own nothingness. Those resolutions which are constructed only to crumble have no substantial basis, because they have so largely as component parts the elements of self-will and self-love; it is therefore not to be wondered at that they never come to any right establishment. Since their foundation is so false, they are necessarily accompanied with fear and hence contain no positive expectancy of good. Good must be as omnipresent as God Himself, and it is only as one wakens to the hope of good that he can find it expressing itself in his living. All the resolutions which could be made would never result in right expression were they not of such nature that there could be maintained in connection with them an expectancy of good.
The forming of good resolutions should really be the defining of one's highest spiritual purposes, and this is a practice which can scarcely be entered upon too frequently. Without an established purpose no one will work at any problem with persistency and right endeavor. A life without a definite purpose is like a ship without a rudder; it can be blown hither and yon with every shifting of the wind; it can be turned this way or that with each moving of the tide. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 15), Mrs. Eddy states a perfect purpose when she says, "We must resolve to take up the cross, and go forth with honest hearts to work and watch for wisdom, Truth, and Love."
