Editorial May 3, 1913 Issue

COMING TO OUR OWN

John B. Willis

It sometimes happens that those who have a great deal of property, have also a great deal of difficulty in paying their debts. An individual may have inherited a fortune, but not the business ability to care for it; hence, though his assets are large they yield no return, and he can neither meet his responsibilities nor fulfil the legitimate expectations of those about him. Under these circumstances, a friend who could teach him so to relate his assets to his liabilities that his wants would be supplied and he be freed from bonds, would be an unqualified blessing.

All this may serve to illustrate the fact that, whereas according to the Bible every believer is an heir of God, the rightful possessor of unlimited spiritual riches in Christ, nevertheless most Christians have a sense of inability to meet their obligations to God and their fellow men. They are actually in want, and ofttimes "sick or in prison," wholly incapable of meeting life's demands or solving life's problems. That they regard themselves as the legitimate heirs to all good, is evidenced by their constant desire and effort to get all good, health, abundance, happiness, peace. All these every worthy, aspiring man is trying to secure, and this he could not do if he did not think they lawfully belonged to him. He is seeking for his own, but he fails utterly to relate his supply to his need, and to all such Christian Science comes as a counselor and guide, a much-needed friend. It comes to place every spiritually-minded man in command of his spiritual resources, to show him how to realize and utilize his every endowment and capacity as the child of God, and it is this fully verified fact of its practical value that is winning for Christian Science the attention and approval of mankind.

It is quite apparent that we really possess only that which we can and do use. A millionaire may in fact be beggarly poor. Indeed it is the irony of the money-lover's experience that in acquiring his riches he loses the capacity to find any real profit or pleasure in their expenditure. The chagrin and self-contempt of the wealthy worldling who thus comes to realize that he has not the ability to command his own, must be unspeakable, and yet how much more humiliating and pitiful the condition of the professed Christian who is so far awakened as to see that, despite the vastness of his inheritance in Christ, he is famishing and in rags. This is the greatest need of the Christian church today, to be aroused, made aware of its spiritual inheritance and privilege in Christ. In an era of marvelous material discovery and progress, when the lure of earthly gain and achievement is so seemingly irresistible and enslaving, men, Christian men, seem to have lost all thought of what it means to enter into life, all desire to become the almoners of that patrimony of spiritual good which awaits their fitness to command their own. Speaking of this, Mrs. Eddy has referred to the limitation and injustice to which we are subjected because we are "ignorant of our divine rights," and declared that, discerning these rights, "we cannot fail to foresee the doom of all oppression;" that the voice of Truth is heard today "asking a fuller acknowledgment of the rights of man as a Son of God" (Science and Health, pp. 381, 227, 226).

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