When, as Christian Scientists, we hold our thought to divine principle and unequivocally reach out for the highest counsel and designation, we cannot fail to apprehend and to heed them. True listening is the prelude to true following. Any thought or desire, any mental picture, that constitutes a denial of God, divine Mind, is a lie of false belief which it would be disobedient to entertain. Suggestions of fear, moral cowardice, resentment, must be rebuked because they are untrue. Whoever would demonstrate harmony and health must turn away from pleasurable and painful claims of materiality. He must be spiritually in earnest.
Jesus exposed the hypocrisy and the deceiving influence of the carnal mind when referring to those whose "eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them." Among the obstacles to spiritual progress are selfishness. self-will, resentment, envy—in other words, personal sense. But these preposterous untruths can be routed as we imbibe the spirit of Christian Science. The remedy for self-will is the acknowledgment and conviction that there is but one will, the divine, allproviding, all-wise, all-satisfying will of God, of Spirit, and the further acknowledgment and conviction that this will is the only will of man and is our will. Since God, good, is universally manifested, there is no reality in self-will, obstinacy, obduracy—resistance to good. So the natural thing is for all of us to feel ourselves innately and happily identified with the perfect purposes of divine Principle. In proportion as we yield to this spiritual influence, fears and false appetites, disease and doubt, fall away.
Man represents the divine will in action, the joy of right achievement. Selfishness is but a mistaken, idolatrous sense of personal selfhood, temporal ambition, lust of material possession. But is selfishness real? Is it something to be condoned or feared? No, for unselfed love is real, and always in accord with the will of God. The entirely obedient heart knows no crossroads, no vacillation. Esteeming the real, the spiritual, above all else, we follow this ideal even though it cost us the world's esteem, and for a while the esteem of those nearest and dearest to us. We cease to chase shadows as we see that man abides in spiritual light, and claim for ourselves the spiritual right to reflect "the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world."
