While a student of Christian Science soon learns to expect rapid physical healing through Science, he is sometimes less awake to the need of right expectation in regard to speedy healings of faults of character.
The definition of "Gad (Jacob's son)" in the Glossary of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy is as follows (p. 586): "Science; spiritual being understood; haste towards harmony." Nowhere is it indicated that the harmony towards which humanity must hasten through an understanding of spiritual being is harmony of body only. Harmony of mind and character is surely included.
Hundreds of students of Christian Science have received comfort and reassurance from Mrs. Eddy's counsel (ibid., p. 485), "Emerge gently from matter into Spirit." But how often we have allowed the gentle emergence to become a dawdle. The word "emerge" is important. The action it implies is of vital importance to each one of us.
The carnal mind, or as it is also called, mortal mind, struggles vigorously to resist the progress which means the annihilation of its claim to reality. Therefore we must couple gentleness with emergence. Otherwise our coming out of matter into Spirit will be fraught with slow and painful struggles. Mrs. Eddy includes "gentleness" in the definition of "oil" in the Glossary of Science and Health. The complete definition reads (p. 592), "Consecration; charity; gentleness; prayer; heavenly inspiration." Anointment with this "oil" forwards a speedy yet painless emergence into the joys of harmonious being.
How often we struggle to overcome faults of character which appear to have become part of our very make-up. Yet God alone is man's Maker, and it is impossible for Him to create anything unlike Himself. While regeneration may appear to take time, this is because the human mind is loath to yield to the divine.
When a light is turned on in a room, patches of darkness do not remain; the entire darkness disappears. When the light of the Christ, Truth, is welcomed into consciousness, it is not only the darkness of physical suffering which is dispelled. The darkness of unlovely traits of character disappears as well, for one no less than the other is a false belief regarding God and man.
The truth of being entertained in consciousness destroys everything unlike God, just as the law of mathematics, properly applied, wipes out every mistake. We are not foolish enough to believe that although the law of mathematics operates instantaneously in regard to the figures one to six, it takes days, months, and years, even decades, for this rule to operate when concerned with the figures seven to nine! Yet it is just as foolish to believe that a lie about God's man calling itself laziness, self-absorption, sensuality, or dishonesty takes longer to fade out of consciousness than a physical belief of inharmony. Neither the lie nor the physical belief has ever touched the man that God made.
In the ninth chapter of Matthew's Gospel we read that when the palsied man was brought to our Master, Christ Jesus said to him, "Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee." Thus he healed him of sin before he healed him of sickness. How speedy was the regeneration in this case! In the Master's understanding of forgiveness spiritual redemption was always included.
That Jesus' teaching enabled others to accomplish rapid healing of evil beliefs is clearly shown in the tenth chapter of Luke's Gospel when the seventy returned to our Master to tell him of the success of their healing mission. "Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name," they told him. "And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven."
That man, who is made in God's likeness, has never been in bondage to the claims of material sense, but has ever expressed the perfection, grace, poise, and loveliness of spiritual being is the teaching of Christian Science. On this basis alone harmony is demonstrated. When one understands that man is a citizen of heaven, no marauding intruder calling itself lovelessness or impatience, greed or bad temper, can enter his experience.
As Satan, the lie about God and man, fell from heaven, harmony, "as lightning" —in a flash—when the truth of man's perfection was perceived, so "as lightning" can the false beliefs of character, which have robbed us of joy, freedom, and usefulness to mankind, drop from us. They are no more a part of our real selfhood than the mistakes which a child makes in his sums are part of the multiplication table. Thus bitterness, regret, and fear that we shall never gain the victory over the shortcomings of which we are so ashamed fall from our thinking, their unreality proved as certainly as the utter unreality of darkness is proved by the presence of light.
One of the greatest needs today is that one arise from the ashes of self-condemnation, from the false conviction that regeneration of character must be a long-drawn-out experience. Then will one joyfully and gratefully make '"haste towards harmony," knowing that the tender Christ worketh with him to expedite a full emergence into Spirit.
