Article February 7, 1914 Issue

Right Consciousness

WILLIAM W. PORTER

Every individual will admit a paramount desire for that which would be conducive to his own welfare and good, and also a willingness and purpose to contribute to the attainment of this end, so far as he knows how to do so ; hence there must be recognized in extension a sincere universal desire for good, and this desire is greatly accentuated by an acquaintance with Mrs. Eddy's teachings, which ever point to the unvarying divine Principle of man's being. This done, one naturally finds the absence of desire for evil, and that evil can seem to be attractive or real only by simulating, as belief, the quality of good; in other words, by deceiving the individual with an assumed value which it does not inherently possess. The highest good of the individual, then, is preserved by guarding against the deceptive presentment of error, or evil, in the guise of truth or good.

The prestidigitator, standing upon the platform before his audience, leads the observer to believe that a coin or other object has disappeared from one place and appeared in another ; and if it were not that the observer had learned from experience the fallacy of this seeming, he would act in keeping with the belief that the assumed occurrence had actually transpired, and in this case he could not do otherwise than run into countless difficulties and discords.

Shakespeare was more than partly right when he wrote, "All the world's a stage," and what Mrs. Eddy has denominated mortal mind is the prestidigitator on this stage of the world, while humanity, observing the seeming occurrences, accepts its subterfuges, tricks, and deceiving movements as real, actual, and inevitable. Thus, wherever the conclusions of a person, based upon the tricks of mortal mind and apparent as sin, disease, and death, touch the circumstances and activities of daily life, discord and distress cannot fail to result.

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