ALL of humanity seems to be victimized more or less by a belief in a thing called the past. What we seem to be to-day is more or less a result of this false claim; for there is in each human consciousness a belief of human parentage with its supposedly inherited tendencies, either good or bad, of a childhood either happy or unhappy, of an education either thorough or superficial, of a home environment either helpful or pernicious—of all sorts of experiences, some uplifting, some debasing, through which we are constantly seeming to pass, and which claim to leave their indelible impression upon us. We appear, so to speak, to be the composite result of what we have been in the past; and we shall continue so until we learn through the blessed teachings of Christian Science that, as John says, "Now are we the sons of God."
Some one has rightly said, "The gods we serve write their names on our faces." A human countenance is not drawn and lined and made unlovely by the emotions of just one day. These things are the result of years of wrong thinking. They are the accumulated evidence of all we have been through in the way of human experience, of the times when we have been error's audience, listening without protest to its lying arguments of a selfhood apart from God, and of the times when we have been error's mouthpiece, also doing its talking for it and perpetuating its false evidence. Nor is the face the only thing upon which the marks of anxiety and fear and overindulgence and resentment and self-will and pride may leave their impress. Neither is the face the only part of the body which becomes changed and softened and harmonious and beautiful as the human consciousness habitually cultivates thinking of a better sort: the whole body, so called, feels the transforming touch of Truth, and responds as naturally and sweetly as some Æolian harp responds to the touch of the winds which sweep across it. That it is all a mental process, hence within the possibility of accomplishment, is clearly stated in our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy (p. 208): "You embrace your body in your thought, and you should delineate upon it thoughts of health, not of sickness."
In view of all this, should not a more persistent, systematic effort be made to eliminate from one's daily thinking all that is plainly destructive to health and happiness? Yet by an odd perversion, the so-called human mind seems to cling with great tenacity to the very things of which it has most need to let go; and one of these is its belief in the past. The average human mind is much like the average storage house, full of all sorts of useless and discarded things, so worn-out and faded and dusty that they should have been dispensed with long ago. Yet how we cling to them, these memories of the past, these things which we all have stored away in consciousness, these hard and heart-breaking and tragic experiences through which we believe we once passed! How we get them out and dust them, and shake them, and turn them over, and tenderly pack them away again, these things which we should be forgetting! How we actually seem to love to dwell on them, to keep them alive, to repeat the story to others, to pity ourselves because of them! And yet how heavily we pay for the privilege of keeping them! There was once a person who for thirteen years paid four hundred and twenty dollars a year to keep some old furniture in storage; but this sinks into insignificance in comparison to the price we sometimes pay for keeping unpleasant memories alive.
