Article October 4, 1913 Issue

Happiness

WILLARD S. MATTOX

The sweetest experience that can come into our lives consists in doing good to others. There is no joy equal to the knowledge that we have helped some faltering step, that we have brought peace to some troubled heart, through our understanding of Christian Science. Now doing good, as we find in Christian Science, means thinking good, so that all the good we are ever able to do to our neighbor is really only a question of what and how we think about him. Right thinking is treatment in Christian Science; and when this is extended and applied to all of our daily affairs, it becomes the most practical kind of social service.

The realization that he is thinking right and doing right becomes the chief joy of the Christian Scientist, and this opens the way for the further metaphysical discovery which all may make, that for genuine and imperishable peace and happiness, we must always look within. The whole habit and tendency of mortal experience, however, is in the opposite direction. Our happiness, we have supposed, depended altogether on externals. The popular teaching is, that environment makes or unmakes the man; that joy consists in something contributed to us from the outside. Persons, the state of the weather, a hundred and one whimsical, ever-changing conditions, are believed to play upon mortal man, as one plays upon the keys of a piano, and this playing is too often in a minor mode. All this is according to the popular theory of existence. It is mortal mind's belief about its own conditions of happiness and misery and their supposed causes.

But this is not the truth of being. The truth, as we are discovering, is that, apart from educated belief, environment or material surroundings do not act or react upon mortals either for better or for worse. Man, on the contrary, under divine guidance, makes his own environment. The divine law of harmonious activity is the law of perpetual happiness to man. The Science of creation shows that what mortal mind calls the outer, has not effect upon the so-called inner, since man is governed solely by God. Consciousness not only "constructs a better body," as we are told in Science and Health (p. 425), but it constructs and determines the nature and character of the body's environment. Infinite good is man's only environment, since he lives and moves and has his being in God, in good.

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