Even in the realm of human endeavor the quality of steadfastness is essential to the highest attainment. As we consider the lives of friends and associates whose achievements we admire in business, scholastic, or artistic fields, we find that, in general, their present attainments are the result of an unswerving devotion to an ideal. We find that they have worked while others have idled, holding to a chosen course instead of vacillating before the allurements of ease, fashion, and popularity. Biographies of men and women of all times, whose names the world honors, reveal lives consecrated to the achievement of an all-absorbing purpose. Probably nothing was ever accomplished for the betterment of the world, or for the increase of human knowledge, without an unfaltering perseverance in some direct line of effort.
If steadfastness is essential to the higher types of human achievement, how much more important it is in the line of spiritual endeavor! If spasmodic efforts and divided interests bring, at best, only mediocre results in human vocations and avocations, how can we hope for success in the greatest of all pursuits—the study and practice of Christian Science— without a ceaseless adherence to its divine Principle, and obedience to its rules? Christian Science is the Science of Mind and demands right thinking. It is exact, demonstrable. When understood, it meets every human need, mental, physical, and moral, and there is no conceivable circumstance to which it cannot be successfully applied.
Let us consider just how this spiritually scientific thinking makes God's power practical in human affairs. From the standpoint of logical reasoning it must be admitted that every material activity and accomplishment has its inception in thought, and that one's entire experience is that which his consciousness embraces. Here the paths of the materialist and the Christian Scientist diverge. Christian Science affirms that there is but one Mind, God, and but one creation, the spiritual universe. It reveals the true identity of man as God's image and likeness, and the unreality of mortal selfhood and all phases of the belief of a limited mind and an evil power. When the spiritually mental nature of true existence is realized, and the allness of God, the one Mind, is persistently affirmed, the healing, liberating influence of Truth governs human conditions, and an improvement is manifested in whatever way it may be needed. All the sickness, sorrow, and poverty of human experience, all phases of discord and limitation, are effects of false thinking. And as we learn to reason from the basis of the allness of God, good, and the nothingness of evil, we experience the fulfillment of Mrs. Eddy's words (Science and Health, p. 261), "Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts."
