Editorial November 13, 1909 Issue

"LET HIM DENY HIMSELF"

John B. Willis

"I AM God's perfect child, and I am trying to know it." So writes a well-meaning student of Christian Science, who follows the statement with the description of an astonishing number of ailments from which she has long suffered and which are still making her life altogether miserable. If the reader of such a statement interests himself sufficiently to substitute the suffering self thus outlined for the "I" declared to be "God's perfect child," the startling incongruity of the thought is at once revealed.

In Christian Science the eternal oneness of Principle and idea, the unfailing likeness of the thing created to the creator, of man to God, is made perfectly clear, hence for a Christian Scientist to classify a sick and suffering personality as God's child is to use terms that would degrade Deity in human judgment and precipitate mental chaos, and it is difficult to explain how any sincere student of our textbook could express himself in terms which are so contrary to its teaching, and which to the intelligent non-Scientist must prove utterly confusing. Nevertheless it is lamentably true that both in private conversation and in public testimony statements like the one quoted are not infrequently heard.

Speaking of the Christ-coming, John says, "As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God." In other words, the realization of spiritual sonship may be gained by all who open the heart and mind to Truth, and it was in keeping with this "blest assurance" of the progressive possibility of attaining unto the divine likeness that Paul wrote to the Philippians, "Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, ... I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." In this and many other passages the apostle has discriminated clearly between God's man and the "I" of human sense. Said Jesus, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself." This self-denial is not demanded of God's child, surely, but of false material sense, of presumptuous human personality.

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