A Student of Christian Science who had successfully done much difficult driving during wartime conditions met with a minor traffic accident and was given a ticket entitled "Failure to Yield." Although the other driver insisted that no one was to blame, the officer was adamant. "Someone is always to blame for an accident," he said, "and someone always gets a ticket." Resentment, humiliation, and a sense of injustice flooded the thought of the student as he drove away. "Someone always gets a ticket," he mused; "but why should it be I?"
Self-righteousness was so promptly recognized in this suggestion that he earnestly prayed, "Let there be no selfish failure to yield to divine leading, that I may learn whatever good lesson there may be for me in this experience." The answer was immediate, "Let Truth uncover and destroy error in God's own way, and let human justice pattern the divine" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, p. 542). In reality, he knew, there is but one presence, one power, one law— God's law of Truth and Love, which unfailingly operates for universal good. Human justice, then, in patterning the divine must be entirely unchanging and impersonal, wherein the human is willing to yield to the divine, the harmonious, the all-loving.
Responsibility for an accident or a mistake, therefore, would lie in one's failure to yield to the ever-present, unerring direction of divine law. Any element of self-will, belief in human ability, carelessness, or even undue haste, would seem to unite one with mortal belief rather than with divine Providence, wherein there is no room for imperfection, for self-commendation and self-condemnation or for personal ability and disability. The student now saw the incident as helpful in alerting his thought to a more conscious unity with God, a unity which can be appropriately applied to every human circumstance.
