Editorial October 5, 1912 Issue

SERVICE AND AT-ONE-MENT

John B. Willis

The statement by an earnest Christian Scientist that he thought of himself only as the conductor through which "the water of life" reached his patients, expressed in a forcefully commonplace fashion his faith in God as the only healer, and his joyous realization of the abundance of that living stream of which if a man drink he "shall never thirst." It quite fails, however, to express the scientific relation of the believer to the redemptive activities of Truth. The faultiness of any concept which conveys the impression that the human factor in any given ministry is regarded as having no quality in common with the divine agent is found in this, that it adheres too closely to the traditional thought of the creature as something apart from the creator, of the doer as separate from his doing.

St. Paul exhorted the early Christians to offer themselves "a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God;" and he thus defined their possible at-one-ment with the divine activity,—a teaching which is logically inferred from his other notable statement that in God "we live, and move, and have our being." Christ Jesus repeatedly expressed the thought that he gave himself to redeem men from sin, and yet he declared that the Father was the only effective agent,—"He doeth the works." The seeming contradiction is removed only when we understand in Christian Science that man is the manifestation of the divine activity, and that we come to our true self-consciousness only as we become conscious of God.

Christian Science is entirely in harmony with the Master and with St. Paul in its teaching that the Christian's relation to the achievements of Truth is quite different from that of the sculptor's chisel to his acclaimed work. God works in and through man to will and to do, and the at-one-ment to effect which Christ Jesus struggled and suffered, finds its active expression and end in every healing work accomplished. It is determined for the individual by the measure of his attainment of spiritual sense, and it is referred to by Mrs. Eddy when she says that all mortals "will through much tribulation yield to the activities of the divine Principle of man in the harmony of Science" (Science and Health, p. 562). The utensil subserves the end to which the workman's thought is directed, but it is entirely indifferent to that end and no part of it, while man has to do with and appears in every overcoming of sickness and sin.

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