"The time for thinkers has come," writes Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (Pref., p. vii). Well may one ask himself, "Am I one of these thinkers?" If you are, you will have an earnest heart-to-heart talk with yourself and from time to time take a mental inventory of your spiritual status. Ask yourself: "Is the power of God, of good, predominant in my thinking? Am I alert to what and how much error claims of me, and do I intelligently recognize these claims for what they are, unreal and powerless, no part of my real selfhood, God's reflection? Do I consistently maintain the great spiritual truths of being as taught by Christ Jesus and persistently contend for my spiritual identity as revealed through Christian Science?"
Whatever is unlike the Christ in one's thinking must be courageously faced, denied, and cast out through the understanding of one's true being as the image and likeness of God. This work of self-examination and self-purification is indispensable to one's progress Spiritward, for it is thus that one demonstrates the clear spiritual perception of Love's allness which alone can cope with the seeming aggressive and subversive phases of evil. It demands constant vigilance to reject as unreal false material sense evidence. Otherwise, the hypnotic suggestions of the anti-Christ are apt to lull one into a state of apathy, and cause one to be lax in the performance of his church duties and indifferent toward national and world conditions.
It has been said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Not for one moment can one lapse in his conviction of the all-power, the all-presence, of the one controlling Mind and of the unceasing activity of Christ. As Christian Scientists we have enlisted to demonstrate and proclaim in every walk of life the healing, liberating power of this Science.
