The connotations of the word "discipline," suggesting correction, restriction, and subordination, are not always acceptable to the undisciplined. Our wise Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, recognized the human need for discipline, and she also realized the human heart's resistance to Love's correction. In "Retrospection and Introspection" she writes (p. 80): "Though the divine rebuke is effectual to the pulling down of sin's strongholds, it may stir the human heart to resist Truth, before this heart becomes obediently receptive of the heavenly discipline. If the Christian Scientist recognize the mingled sternness and gentleness which permeate justice and Love, he will not scorn the timely reproof, but will so absorb it that this warning will be within him a spring, welling up into unceasing spiritual rise and progress."
We know in Science that the man of God's creating, the image and likeness of perfect God, is not in need of discipline. It is human consciousness that needs correction and purification from the false mortal concept of man. This cleansing of human thought must of necessity go on until the human misconception is replaced by the spiritual concept. Human consciousness must be purged of all beliefs of a life apart from God, the divine Principle of man's existence. Thought must be disciplined until the perfect likeness is perceived and established in consciousness, and all self-will is laid down in humble obedience to the divine will.
Mrs. Eddy tells us in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 185): "Self-renunciation of all that constitutes a so-called material man, and the acknowledgment and achievement of his spiritual identity as the child of God, is Science that opens the very flood-gates of heaven; whence good flows into every avenue of being, cleansing mortals of all uncleanness, destroying all suffering, and demonstrating the true image and likeness. There is no other way under heaven whereby we can be saved, and man be clothed with might, majesty, and immortality."
