You can have a plastic flower garden with flowers of all sizes, shapes, and colors. Each flower can be exactly where you want it, and it will be right there every morning of every day. You can memorize this garden so that you can think of it whenever you want to, even draw a picture of it for anyone who is interested. No weeds. Very little care. It's beautiful. But it's dead.
As we develop our concept of Christian Science and of the life we live in demonstrating its truths, what is our ideal? Are we seeking in our study of Christian Science a life without challenges, one in which nothing changes from day to day or year to year, one where we can memorize all the rules and all the statements of Truth —where we can memorize the answer for every question and be right without doing too much thinking? Or do we conceive our ideal in terms of infinite progression, singing an ever "new song . . . unto the Lord"? Ps. 96:1;
The difference between the two concepts is one of life and death, of spontaneity and stagnation, originality and monotony, joy and boredom, existence that is limitless or limited. The difference is in seeing Mary Baker Eddy as the perpetual Leader of those to whom she revealed the spiritual idea of the everguiding divine Mind or seeing her as a mortal who gave us some truths we can assimilate but who is now gone.
