Does one, no matter what the considerations of self-interest, refuse to lower his standards of excellence? If so, then it can be said that the world has need of him. The greatest contributors to the world's good are those men and women who bring to it the true idea of God and who hold to the highest mode of thought and action of which they are capable. The Abraham Lincolns, David Livingstones, and Florence Nightingales of this world have consistently rejected false arguments of expediency which urged them to let down their spiritual standards of service, conduct, or excellence; and so must every individual who is really to help humanity.
Such a one was Mary Baker Eddy. Following her healing by spiritual means of a spinal injury considered fatal, she desired to give mankind in a form they could readily understand the demonstrable truth which heals. Mrs. Eddy devoted years of unremitting, unselfed labor to understanding the divine Principle of her healing. And in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," and her other divinely inspired writings she gives her glorious revelation of the allness of God, good, and the nothingness of evil.
Isaiah urged (62:10), "Go through, go through the gates; prepare ye the way of the people; cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones; lift up a standard for the people." Such a standard our Leader gives us when she writes, "The standard of perfection was originally God and man" (Science and Health, p. 470). And she says further, "God is the creator of man, and, the divine Principle of man remaining perfect, the divine idea or reflection, man, remains perfect."
