In the Beatitudes, Jesus stressed the necessity for meekness. He blessed the poor in spirit, the meek, and those "which do hunger and thirst after righteousness" and promised them that they should possess the kingdom of heaven, inherit the earth, be filled. Mary Baker Eddy declares that "humility is the stepping-stone to a higher recognition of Deity" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 1), and that "humility is lens and prism to the understanding of Mind-healing" (ibid., p. 356); and in many other passages she urges upon her followers the demonstration of that humbleness which she herself so remarkably expressed.
Why this insistence upon a quality which the world as a whole esteems very little or despises altogether? To the Christian Scientist the answer is clear. The belief in a mind apart from God—in a personal, separate sense of existence based upon human personality, upon prideful mortal mind—is the chief enemy to be overcome, the major obstacle to spiritual progress. Progression from sense to Soul is difficult, if not impossible, when consciousness is flooded by prideful, self-assertive thinking. Furthermore, pride and egotism are limitation. The more strongly one claims his own intellectual pre-eminence, apart from Mind, the more he is clamping upon himself the limitations, the shackles, which are the inevitable accompaniment of such thinking.
In divine Science, Mind is All-in-all, and man is the perfect reflection of the All-Mind, deriving all his qualities and characteristics from that one Mind. One's conquest over the doleful triad, sin, disease, and death, depends upon his rejection of any claims of substance, activity, or law which seem to derive from any source other than the Mind which is God, and upon his recognition of man's identity as reflection. To the extent that you and I can actually realize our true identity or spiritual existence as idea, the image of Mind, and can, conversely, rule out of consciousness the suggestions of another separate entity calling itself man—us—to that extent we are victorious over all the claims of sin, disease, and death.
