Article December 10, 1921 Issue

The Compass

ARCHIBALD CAREY

To beginners in Christian Science as well as to more advanced students the question often arises: I have learned to know that all is infinite Mind, Love, good, and its perfect infinite manifestation, the spiritual universe and spiritual man; how can anything that is not good still seem to me to have reality or power? Why does not everything that seems to oppose or deny this absolute fact instantaneously disappear from even a claim of consciousness?

A familiar example of the workings of the human mind shows how this seems to be possible. Most of us have had the experience of being "turned around" in a strange city or country so that we have had an entirely wrong sense of direction, and north, perhaps, has seemed to be where south actually was. If a man who has such a false sense of direction is given a compass, he is in much the same position as one who has begun to grasp the truth of Christian Science. He may instantly recognize the correct directions and lose his false sense, but usually, particularly if he has long accepted or failed to challenge his false belief of direction, he finds a strange situation in his thinking. He definitely knows that the compass is right; he therefore knows that the sense of direction he had before is entirely wrong and untrue, and yet his "feeling" of direction, everything in his experience up to that minute, continues so strongly to insist that his old belief of direction is correct that it is often a long, slow process to correct and destroy the false sense so thoroughly that it will not longer influence his conduct and will be completely replaced by the right sense of direction. Even when the individual is thoroughly convinced that one is true and the other false it often takes long continued and patient application to fully eliminate the false concept so that not an unrecognized vestige of it remains.

Just as a man would so correct his false belief about directions by patient substitution of the true directions until even what he calls his "unconscious" actions would no longer be subject to the false sense and he has completely and fully destroyed the erroneous concept and its effects upon his conduct, so the truth one learns in Christian Science must be conscientiously applied to the correction of the erroneous concepts which the peculiar construction of the human mind seems to allow to persist even after the truth which means their annihilation has been recognized and accepted as absolute truth by the individual. Until this process is complete the false beliefs will seem to continue to exist side by side with the opposite truth, and will continue to affect the conduct and environment of the one who is allowing them to occupy his thought.

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