Perhaps there is no quality more needed in Christian warfare than that of steadfastness. "Patient continuance in well doing" is required of those who would "fight the good fight of faith" and "lay hold on eternal life." The steady, patient, faithful effort to understand and to prove the healing efficacy of Truth for themselves and for others is needed by those who, like the Master, would progress Spiritward until they have attained complete victory over the evils which accompany a mortal and material sense of existence. If they would finally ascend in thought above the material plane of thinking and living, as Jesus did, they must partake of his faithfulness, consecration, patience, and persistence in right endeavor. Writing of the example of Christ Jesus, Mary Baker Eddy has said (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 26), "Our great Way-shower, steadfast to the end in his obedience to God's laws, demonstrated for all time and peoples the supremacy of good over evil, and the superiority of Spirit over matter."
Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, than whom the early Christian church included no warrior more valiant in the Cause of Christ, demonstrated in a marvelous way the quality of steadfastness. Persecuted, maligned, and resisted to the utmost, he continued on his missionary journeys until he had carried Christianity into all the countries bordering the more eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Preaching at one time to the elders of the church at Ephesus and referring to some of the many kinds of opposition he had encountered, he said, "But none of these things move me."
And Christians in later times, even those present-day Christians who have come to be known as Christian Scientists, often find, as did Paul, that opposition to Christ, Truth, makes it necessary to resist with faith and understanding the aggressive suggestions of error which otherwise might cause them to falter and fail. Sometimes these evil suggestions seem temporarily to succeed in their effort to induce workers to accept as valid the deceptive arguments of doubt and discouragement. At such times of trial of their faith, when workers may perhaps find themselves enveloped in a mental cloud of discouragement, perhaps even temporarily in the darkness of despair, due to doubt of their understanding of the truth or of their ability to demonstrate it—at such times they may recall with profit the following lines of the poet Longfellow:
