Article November 2, 1907 Issue

THE DIVINE OPPORTUNITY

CATHARINE SEVERENS.

The gospel of Christian Science is above all else the gospel of hope and good cheer to humanity. There is no other religious teaching which offers so great an opportunity for growth to every one, whether he be under the bondage of sin or sickness or discontent, as that embodied in the sublime uplifting assertion, "Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ." This eternal truth, and its demonstration through Christian Science, has shaken thought out of its long dream of the power and tenacity of evil, into the glorious understanding of the unreality of that dream, into the conviction that evil has actually no part, either past or present, in the divine plan. So to the spiritually awakened thought there is absolutely no evil bondage, no ugly past, no clinging influence of remembered sin or sorrow, nothing to fetter the unfolding understanding or to clog the advancing feet. This fact applies not only to the one who has been heavy laden with sin, but to the sick and suffering as well, since sin and suffering alike are but false concepts from the beginning. In Isaiah we read: "I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins," and Paul says, "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit."

The results of sin, made manifest as discord and disease, endure only so long as sin is cherished in thought, and these results disappear as the wrong thoughts which occasioned them are put away. Through the teaching of Christian Science we break away entirely from the old doctrine of endless punishment, and we begin to realize the absolute immunity of the earnest and honest seeker after truth. Paul's words to the Philippians are most helpful to one who is striving to rise out of the dead past: "This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark." This "forgetting" is only possible through Christian Science, whereby we learn that evil has no more power over us as a past experience than it has as a present possibility, that because evil never was a part of Mind, it cannot recur to Mind, and from this firm alone we are to advance, with no backward looks nor fears, along the way of spiritual growth. We not only may but we must turn persistently toward the Light which is to lead us, pressing "toward the mark" of individual attainment with the conscious courage of spiritual freedom.

Surely there is no diviner hope for mankind than in this eternal opportunity, no surer evidence of the love of God, who forever holds man perfect in his relation to the perfect Father. Mrs. Eddy says, in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 15), "What a faith-lighted thought is this! that mortals can lay off the 'old man,' until man is found to be the image of the infinite good that we name God, and the fulness of the stature of man in Christ appears." The "old man" is simply the old concept of man, including the mistakes which arise from this false concept,—the mistakes of chronic and lingering disease, of evil habits, of discontented and inharmonious dispositions, of all the wretchedness to which material sense bears testimony. There is nothing enduring in a mistake of any nature; it is the truth which endures, the truth that the only reality is and forever has been God and His eternal manifestation, in whose light the mist of error dissolves into nothingness.

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