Great encouragement, burdens made light, thought uplifted with hope and promise have been the experience of countless numbers who have taken up the study of Christian Science. Some understanding of the great fact of spiritual reality, attainable only by walking in the pathways of Truth, has been gained. They have seen the operation of the law of divine Principle, the law of God, who is Love, nullify false material laws that had held them in bondage. They have come to realize in some degree the facts of true existence. Thus they may be likened to mountain climbers who have found the foothills on their way to higher peaks.
Higher peaks of spiritual understanding, upward and still upward, should ever be the goal of the alert and sincere student of Christian Science. He will permit no sense of ease in matter to persuade him that he has progressed far enough or that he can rest, at least for a while, where he now is, among the foothills. The call is (Isa. 2:3), "Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths."
This call means that one must no longer be satisfied with a merely human sense of goodness and the practice thereof, no longer regard any phase of evil as inevitable, patiently to be endured until some uncertain future time. Christian Science shows that mankind suffers only by consenting, voluntarily or involuntarily, to the beliefs of mortal mind; that the understanding and recognition of God as possessing all power and persistent refusal to consent to evil as real or as having power free one from its baneful effects. The almost superstitious belief that merely attending our church services and reading a certain amount of the Bible and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, entitle one to spiritual benefits and progress, is a phase of the human sense of goodness which too often lulls one into complacency. Goodness that is of God reflects His attributes in daily demonstrations. Without these manifestations of the activity and power of God, that which we call goodness is but a shadow of the real good.
