Article February 13, 1904 Issue

"Be it Slow or Fast."

SAMUEL GREENWOOD.

The boy who struggles with a difficult problem, working hard to apply correctly the rules he has already learned, or to understand those more advanced which may be necessary to complete his work; who turns back after repeated failure to begin again with the knowledge gained from these experiences, and who at last after earnest, careful, steadfast work arrives at the correct solution, has made a scientific demonstration as well as the more fortunate scholar who, with less time and labor, may have reached the same end. The rules used and the Principle demonstrated in each case were the same: the difference in time and work was due to the degree of knowledge and capacity possessed by the two students.

The ability to understand Truth so as to demonstrate scientifically the harmonious realities of being, the universal life-problem, does not come to mortals at the beck and call of their desire. Individual, as well as national, reform includes more than is superficially evident, and neither is accomplished without labor. The human transformation, wherein the sense of sin and suffering gives place to God's spiritual idea which includes no sickness or evil, is not an instantaneous experience. The interval between the individual's awakening from the delusion and deception of evil and matter, and his realization of perfect being as God,—good,—only, is a continuous conflict between the Spirit and flesh, and will last until God, "whose [only] right it is shall reign" supreme.

The "earthward gravitation of sensualism" (Science and Health, p. 272) weights the fluttering wings of a struggling desire for spirituality, hence the disappointed hope and the weary sense of time that often mark the early stages of progress. If the human weariness of suffering always denoted a corresponding weariness of sin, there would be fewer laggards along the road to harmony, for but little permanent progress can be made while the heart clings to the idols of self and sense, even though the hands are outstretched to God for physical help. The longing for bodily ease does not always imply the readiness to meet the spiritual demands of Truth; hence "Love is not hasty to deliver us" (Science and Health, p. 22) till the heart is willing to give up to God. But while this is so, who among us has risen to that altitude of spiritual understanding which can always discern where ignorance ends and willing sin begins? The forms and phases of human error are so many and varied, and the means whereby the unwary sense is mesmerized are so subtle and unsuspected, that one were wiser not to say of another that his healing is delayed because of sin, remembering that "all have sinned, and come short of the glory [perfection] of God."

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