According to Bible history, King David refused to heed God's command not to number the people. Instead, he allowed Satan to "provoke" him into counting the numerical strength of the Israelites, despite the warning of Joab, captain of David's army. It is related further: "And God was displeased with this thing; therefore he smote Israel."I Chron. 21:7;
God is infinite good and does not punish us. But there is a practical spiritual message behind the warning to David: rely on human personality and material resources and your spiritual capacity to heal is "smitten" by a physical sense of God and man.
Mrs. Eddy, to protect her Church— and its mission to restore primitive Christian healing—from the temptation of the human mind to look at all things materially, wrote a By-Law entitled "Numbering the People." It reads: "Christian Scientists shall not report for publication the number of the members of The Mother Church, nor that of the branch churches. According to the Scripture they shall turn away from personality and numbering the people."Manual of The Mother Church, Art. VIII, Sect. 28;
Numbers generally are considered very important in measuring success. Multitudes thronged Christ Jesus, and many others were converted to Christianity by Paul and the apostles. God's spiritual healing was attractive to a people hungering for freedom from want, sickness, and sin. But was it the primary goal of Jesus and the early Christians to attract multitudes of people? Did they see themselves as a small group of physical personalities attracting large numbers of other personalities?
The drawing of the multitudes was a result of clear spiritual perception and demonstration by Jesus and the early Christians. They discerned the healing and saving power of the ever-present kingdom of heaven. They measured their effectiveness by how conscious they were of the all-power of God, good, and the illegitimacy of evil. To the degree that they were conscious that man is God's perfect image, they proved God's infinite spiritual individuality. To that same degree they destroyed the concepts that would label man as sensual, selfish, unreceptive to spiritual ideas, to healing, and therefore to divine worship.
Had Jesus and his followers held materialistic perceptions of man, they would have placed limitations on their work and appealed to few. Instead, their demonstration of error's falsity illustrated what Mrs. Eddy later perceived: "The realization that all inharmony is unreal brings objects and thoughts into human view in their true light, and presents them as beautiful and immortal."Science and Health, p. 276; To the Master, success in his mission was not a case of how many people he could get to come to him. He was doing his Father's will by bringing "objects and thoughts into human view in their true light."
It is our job to be clearsighted enough to see everyone's true individuality, the natural, divine qualities of man that also make up the true idea of Church. If our church is short on members, it may be our limited, physical view of God and man that is restricting our demonstration. We may be striving to fill a structure with physical personalities. What is needed is a pure sense of Church, which is gained through a true sense of God and man. Mrs. Eddy says: "God is individual and personal in a scientific sense, but not in any anthropomorphic sense. Therefore man, reflecting God, cannot lose his individuality; but as material sensation, or a soul in the body, blind mortals do lose sight of spiritual individuality."ibid., pp. 336-337.
This passage, carefully examined, suggests several questions. "How do I see God—as someone with human traits showing personal favoritism?" "Do I see man reflecting human traits of this anthropomorphic God, some good and some bad?" Or, "Do I see God as the divine presence imparting impartially His spirituality to man?" And, "Am I becoming more conscious of everybody's ability to be aware of his own God-given individuality?"
If we lose our correct sense of God, we lose our correct sense of ourselves and others, thus becoming "blind mortals" who are immersed in personality and have lost the ability to recognize those who would be attracted to our churches and fill them. The first step in overcoming any such blindness is to deny any sense of God as human or man as material. Then, we must never identify as man any thought or action that is hateful, fearful, skeptical, vain, ignorant, or stubborn. These suggestions should be replaced with the qualities that identify all as children of God: spiritual strength, joy, wisdom, and love. Human personality and numbering the people will in this way lose importance because we are too busy appreciating such spiritual qualities in all individuals. And the power of divine Science realized will draw the receptive to our churches.
