Christian Science is positive in its declaration that God, exhaustless power and intelligence, is all that governs and regulates the universe, including man. How encouraging it is to know that Mind adjusts all action, and since God is omnipotent, All-power, the individual is relieved of all so-called responsibility. As mortals forsake human will and stubbornness and assume the humility of Christ—humility in the sense of acknowledging Spirit as All-in-all —not only will the seeming difficulties of the individual be regulated and solved, but those of the whole world as well. It is self-conceit, love of power, pride of place, and, above all else, it is ignorance of divine Principle and its idea that leads mortals to assume that with them rests the responsibility of directing their own affairs and those of their neighbors.
In "Miscellaneous Writings," page 353, Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, tells a story of a young man who applied for work at her brother's mill. In the absence of the overseer, a practical joker set the man at work pouring a bucket of water, at stated intervals, on the regulator. Mrs. Eddy says: "When my brother returned and saw it he said to the jester,'You must pay that man.' Some people try to tend folks, as if they should steer the regulator of mankind. God makes us pay for tending the action that He adjusts." In connection herewith it is profitable to turn to II Samuel and read of the time when David and his hosts had gone to Kirjath-jearim to bring the ark on a cart and carry it in triumph to Zion. Coming to the threshing floor, "Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God." This illustrates how fear and impatience make mortal man prone to reach out with material means in order that he may assist God, the cause of all true being. Uzzah had presumed to keep the "ark of the testimony" from reeling. Seeing no farther than the false evidence of the personal senses, he had tried to aid with human methods that which was holy, instead of relying absolutely on God, divine Principle, confident that all was well in the province of Mind.
The basis of all human ills is the belief that man is a creator and that matter is substance, and it is this belief wherein people dig pitfalls for themselves. But the student of Christian Science finds in the Scriptures, with the "Key" Mrs. Eddy has given to mankind in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," that God, who is infinite Spirit, has already created all there is—His creation is and always has been perfect and immutable and is infinitely unfolding. Since God made all there is and fashioned it good, how can error, which would be more than all, be added to His creation? Turning to Principle for surcease from this so-called dream existence, the constant command to each individual is a "right about face" from matter to Spirit. For the one who is earnestly seeking Christ, Truth, must continually face Mind, divine Principle. He must turn absolutely to God, replacing the false testimony of the five physical senses with the true knowledge of what actually is. The suffering from the belief in material pleasures and ambition; suffering from the belief of sickness, sin, and death, is the "pay" required of mortals for "tending the regulator." Principle demands absolute consecration to itself, since health and sickness, life and death, or the real and any supposed opposite cannot stand side by side.
