When the humanly prosperous business man stops to consider why he is thankful, he needs to differentiate carefully between the true substance which is Spirit and the illusion of materiality. To be glad that a course of heartless profiteering or of ruthless monopolizing has brought one wealth is not to be truly grateful to Principle at all. In fact, such a state of thinking is in no sense true satisfaction. If, in the eagerness for money and more money, for supposed power and more power, one has seemingly crushed out legitimate competition, suppressed development, and brought ruin to others, one may feel temporarily a sense of satiety in matter, but one has achieved no eternal success, such as comes only through expressing divine intelligence. For genuine joy, the very desire to accumulate large amounts of matter has to give way to the comprehension of Mind's infinity.
Christian Science takes nothing away from any one, but always gives the true idea in place of the counterfeit. Hence, spiritual business is indeed big, simply because it is unlimited activity in accord with Principle; but it is not concerned with any belief in concentrated material power. Christian Science shows that the real capital, always usable though quite apart from any human concept of money, is divine intelligence manifest as exactly right activity for all. The time must come when all turn together equally to this one inexhaustible capital and find it sufficient for every righteous development. On page 3 of her "Message for 1900" Mrs. Eddy writes: "Now, what saith Christian Science? 'When a man is right, his thoughts are right, active, and they are fruitful; he loses self in love, and cannot hear himself, unless he loses the chord. The right thinker and worker does his best, and does the thinking for the ages. No hand that feels not his help, no heart his comfort. He improves moments; to him time is money, and he hoards this capital to distribute gain.'"
Gratitude acceptable to God, then, is not for one's having become a millionaire but always for having proved that divine intelligence alone governs the real man, in spite of any seeming. Of course, the one who prides himself on a mortal sense of poverty is just as reprehensible as the one who exults in a mortal sense of wealth. Indeed, when Christ Jesus declared that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," he surely meant by "a rich man" any one who believes that matter is substance. He could not have meant the real man, who is rich in spirituality, and who is already and forever experiencing heaven. The man who, though seemingly poor in the so-called goods of this world, believes that he is lacking something desirable, is necessarily finding it difficult to gain any place in the divine kingdom. That is to say, his seeming experience is so choked with material belief that he is, to that very extent, not rejoicing in the ever presence of divine Love as all-sufficient. Any one who believes that matter is substance, whether he seems to possess it or not, certainly has too much of false belief and not enough of spiritual understanding.
