The Apostle James exhorted his brethren, "Let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing." What a rarity is a person who wants nothing! It seems to be the nature of mortal man to feel limited, incomplete, and insecure. Undoubtedly, the reason for this is to be seen in the apostle's further words, "A double minded man is unstable in all his ways." Double-mindedness infers belief in both good and evil as real; it acknowledges imperfection, incompleteness, and lack, whereas the divine image and likeness, or real man of God's conception, is wholly good, expressive of perfection, completeness, satisfaction.
The patience enjoined by James is the steadfast claiming of this fact of man's perfect, spiritual being, even in the presence of contrary material evidence. Passive resignation to lack or any other error is a false concept of patience. While it is undoubtedly better to bear adversity in human experience with fortitude rather than with chafing and resentment, yet this attitude of thought may do little toward overcoming wrong conditions, because it may regard them as real and perhaps unavoidable. Likewise chronic dissatisfaction, human wanting, and impatient demanding virtually affirm the absence of good, and thus temporarily close the door to the fulfillment of righteous aspirations. The true patience which is a quality of God is the constant, grateful recognition of the reality and presence of all good and the consequent unreal nature of lack and other evil appearances. Many a victory over error has been won by exercising this spiritual quality of steadfastness, adhering unwaveringly to the absolute truths of being, while utterly refusing consent to contrary sense testimony, be it ever so plausible and insistent.
Christian Science educates thought away from the ignorant, false theological belief that man is a mortal person existing in a material universe, to the understanding that in his real being he is the perfect expression of the one infinite Mind, God. This spiritual concept of man, vague and unreal to the material senses, is perfectly tangible to spiritual consciousness, and is manifested in true individuality.
