"And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands, establish thou it." Mankind has more or less generally accepted a division of work into works, of Life into lives. That is to say, we have educated ourselves into an acceptance of a classification of work as failing, poor, fair, good, better, best. Though there is probably no one who in youth does not dream of a noble end, there are few who accomplish what they start out to accomplish. High resolves, obscured by procrastination, sloth, impatient vanity, or passing attractions, are viewed with backward glance, and dreams of success settle too often into a toleration of a finite capacity that with wistful or dull eye stands aside to see the enduring ones march on. This gradation of human activity has led to a further gradation of the work itself into the positive, comparative, and superlative degrees of dignity and honor. Thus washing, banking, writing have different degrees of excellence in the judgment of the world, with the result that some work is poorly done because thought beneath the dignity of the doer, too hard for him, or not worth doing intelligently. While there have always been some who have seen that "all service ranks the same with God," many have felt themselves sloping down to a mediocre or even unworthy end with a sense of inadequacy at unfulfilled ideals. This unsatisfactory state of affairs will continue so long as we believe that we are laboring for something which perishes, which may or may not be attained, or for a glory that is not the common gift to all.
The Christian Scientist, face to face with the fact that God is All, that this All is infinite intelligence with its infinity of idea, is forced to prove that the only condition of affairs there is, is entirely satisfactory. Now either God is omnipotent, or He is not. If He is, the answer to every prayer for help must be that man is helped already, for the fact of God's infinite power excludes the existence of another power against which man has to struggle. God is omniscient, or He is not. If He is, there can be no knowledge except the consciousness that is God, no mind to create that which God does not create. God is omnipresent, or He is not. If He is, there can be no presence anywhere, no space, no past, present, or future that is not the presence of God. Now a Christian Scientist accepts without reservation the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of God. It is this infinitude of the perfection of being which makes of a Christian a Scientist, for logic and reason demand that that which is true be sought and found. It is not that a Christian Scientist wants to prove the allness of God; he has to, for he has no mind to prove anything else, and there is not anything else to prove.
Then it makes no difference whether we are giving a concert program, managing a household, or running an elevator, we must "do all to the glory of God." However, it is not enough just to say that God is All. Just as we are really face to face with the infinitude of witness of Truth, we are apparently face to face with the evidence of the senses, the witness of matter. Of these two witnesses, one is good, the other bad. Being opposites, both cannot be true. The mortal evidence, with its presuming witnesses of lack, ignorance, or failure, obviously contradicts the allness of God. But God is All. Therefore the claim of matter, being no part of God's activity, is just a lie about the truth and, of course, the opposite of the real. Herein lies the science of metaphysics. We cannot be confused by a lie, once we know the truth. Of course the lie says man is diseased, weary, forsaken. That is the contradiction of the fact that God's creation is ever well, ever refreshed, never separate from the Father. Of course the lie claims that man may fail. That is all it can say about the true man, who is forever successful, whose only destiny is to reach unerringly that only ideal held in the Mind of Truth. Whatever this mortal mind may say must be the reverse of the truth, for if it told the truth it would not be a lie. This human sense of things can therefore never improve, having no life within itself. Its only existence being an illusory one, the suppositional opposite of the real, it remains ever the same, forever the unconscious, non-acting denial of God's allness.
