Article January 29, 1916 Issue

Spiritual Strength

ZORA MAY DUNNING

One Sunday morning I had occasion for great thanksgiving. Christian Science has helped me to solve many hard problems, but there came one which seemed especially difficult. Having worked for a long time over it, always seemingly faced by a stone wall, I was becoming somewhat discouraged. On this particular Sunday, being unable to attend the church service, I took up one of the Christian Science pamphlets, and in turning over the leaves I found this statement from page 128 of Science and Health, where Mrs. Eddy says: "Business men and cultured scholars have found that Christian Science enhances their endurance and mental powers, enlarges their perception of character, gives them acuteness and comprehensiveness and an ability to exceed their ordinary capacity."

Instantly it dawned upon my consciousness just what the stone wall had been. Unconsciously I had been feeling that I did not possess the ability to do what was right for me to do; consequently I was doubting God's ability. In other words, while declaring God's universe perfect, I had entertained a feeling that I lacked something when called upon to perform an allotted task outside the line along which I had been educated. I had been thinking not of my true self but of the weak human sense of self. To know that God's idea, man, has the ability and endurance to exceed ordinary capacity, and that I as God's reflection had the alertness and ability to perceive and execute the Father's business in the most intelligent and efficient manner, certainly meant very much toward the solving of my problem. Instead of the stone wall, vista after vista opened up, showing plainly how man is unlimited in his divinely bestowed capacities, and that, as Mrs. Eddy reminds us, "Soul has infinite resources with which to bless mankind" (Science and Health, p. 60).

I had often declared that God was my strength and an ever present help, but it had never dawned on me before just how much this statement might include. Certainly strength is unlimited; but that it might include the qualities of perception, comprehensiveness, and acuteness had not before been considered, strength having seemed to be mainly of a physical instead of a spiritual nature. In every-day thinking we are very apt to associate strength wholly with bone and muscle; but in thinking of it as spiritual, it necessarily would include every quality which tends toward fortifying one against the belief of inability to perform one's right and proper work, and to see it in this light surely removes every seeming obstacle.

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