Editorial November 2, 1907 Issue

OUR HIGH CALLING

John B. Willis

One of the greatest stimulants to human aspiration is recognition at the hands of our peers. To be called out and up, named as capable of a splendid part and set to the doing of it, this helps men. and as nothing else perhaps, to find themselves and to measure up to their highest possibilities. This fact will account in part for the quickening which Christ Jesus imparted to his followers, and for the astonishing efficiency to which they so quickly attained. Through his own accessibility to Truth he reached that transcendent consciousness which is disclosed in the 17th chapter of St. John, and which enabled him to say. "I and my Father are one." He then addressed the simple countrymen who had become his disciples, not only as friends, but as associates and successors in the sublimest undertaking and greatest rule of which men could dream. He recognized their true selfhood and service; that their dignity and power was commensurate with his own.

Speaking to them of their high calling, he did not say, ye may become, but ye are the salt of the earth. In the present tense of spiritual realization he expressed what to their faith could hardly have been even a vision of possibilities, but what he saw in them their love for and responsiveness to him enabled them to see in themselves; and John is soon heard declaring, "Beloved, now are we the sons of God." This is the wonder and worth of Christ Jesus call to men, and this Christian Science repeats, in that it lifts the sense of man's greatness and capacity until the heart is encouraged and strengthened for an order of endeavor that seems strangely new to modern Christianity. namely, to do the Master's works.

The relation of a true sense of self to a true sense of sufficiency is discovered in due time by every earnest and thoughtful worker for the Master. "Like the great Exemplar, the healer should speak to disease as one having authority over it" (Science and Health, p. 395). The vastness of "the earth" of false belief, and the seeming mightiness of the momentum toward evil which humanity has acquired through the ages of false sense,—all this would stagger if not overwhelm one who has not learned that the true man is privileged to stand as did Christ Jesus when, with a self-assertion which was no less humble than divine, he faced the black abyss of error with the mighty declaration. "I am the light of the world." He who stands for and with the Christ-idea may say with the psalmist of old, "Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob." Thus to realize that our human sense of weakness and unworthiness is not the determinative fact, but that God, eternal Truth, is at work in and through us, to will and to do of His own good pleasure,—this gives a sense of sufficiency which counts. A gentle, loving sense it is, but it can face the world, the flesh, and the devil, if so be, without hesitation and without a tremor.

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