Article August 23, 1913 Issue

GROWTH

ARTHUR CHAMBERLAIN.

Since God and His idea are perfect, how can there be any room or opportunity for growth? is a question which seems to perplex some students of Christian Science. The confusion of thought which gives rise to this query apparently comes from two causes: first, a failure to differentiate between Principle and idea, and the human sense of existence; second, to distinguish between perfection as an end and perfection as a means. Mrs. Eddy makes this clear when she says: "Time has not yet reached eternity, immortality, complete reality. ... All things will continue to disappear, until perfection appears and reality is reached" (Science and Health, p. 353).

God is infinite; in His infinitude all growth is forever included and forever present in the eternal now. It is impossible for God to develop or to unfold to Himself aught of which He is not conscious, since He is eternally conscious of all that is and that can be, even Himself forever reflected in His ideas. To say, however, that no sense of growth can come to our concept of God, is to fall into the error that the student is again and again warned against in Science and Health, wherein Mrs. Eddy has repeatedly pointed out the distinction that must be observed between divine Principle and the human concept of good. To the student of Science and Health it becomes overwhelmingly evident that the likeness of the perfect, spiritual man to God, is a likeness in quality, not in quantity (see Science and Health, p. 361); hence it must be the quality of God's knowledge, which quality is spiritual, and not the quantity of God's knowledge, which quantity is infinite, that the spiritual man reflects. Growth must go on until, as Paul says, "we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

When we consider that infinity is endless because it is eternal, we see that no idea of God can ever come to the end of its unfoldment; only God is capable of compassing infinity, of possessing an eternal, present consciousness of His own infinitude. It behooves us all to turn away, definitely and forever, from the age-old concept which regards finish and perfection as implying a stopping, a cessation of any sort. "Give her the glory of going on, and still to be," wrote Tennyson of virtue, and perfection is the sum of all virtues.

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