Article September 9, 1916 Issue

Who Are Ready?

NELLIE B. MACE

When individual consciousness first becomes attentive to the message of Christian Science, it discerns more or less clearly that this is a call to witness to a wonderful union of purity and spiritual understanding, a wedding of realization to the ideal which promises to destroy all the physical, mental, and moral plagues which beset the various beliefs of material existence. Divine Love is recognized as the tender, imperative Principle of this newly entered upon sense of existence, and it is joyfully anticipated that henceforth consciousness shall reflect only and entirely Love, that practice shall conform to the absolute basic truth that God is All-in-all.

One's footing on this new and glorious highway being fairly established through his own healing and his rejuvenated happiness, he is likely at first to expect all with whom he comes in contact, especially his nearest friends, to listen with rapt interest to his story, which is so obviously true to him, and to hasten to join him in this new way. With a sense of unpleasant amazement he finds instead that, as in the Master's parable, some "made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise," while he feels the spite of the "remnant." But he learns the lesson, valuable in all his future work, that they who are ready for the marriage of the king's son are those who reflect God in individual consciousness, and so learning, he sees that it is his own thought which he must guard at all times, lest he himself admit the reality of some mind or minds other than the one perfect Mind, and thus lose the light which at first so illuminated him.

While a Christian Scientist can never do more than work out his own salvation, and this work lies wholly within his own consciousness, yet in so far as he includes within his consciousness the cognition of all mankind, his salvation does involve others to the extent of destroying his wrong thought of them, as well as his own more personal sinful beliefs. Mrs. Eddy understood the need of the human heart to recognize and to fulfil its duty to all others when she bade us pray daily, "May Thy Word enrich the affections of all mankind, and govern them!" (Manual, Art. VIII, Sect. 4.)

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