Article October 18, 1919 Issue

The Open Road to Freedom

THOMAS A. ELLIS

OF all the personal devils that seem to beset the human race, there is none more persistent than the imp called worry. The man who said, "I have lived a long life and had a great deal of trouble, though most of it never happened," made a statement which contains food for serious thought. To those who are submitting their life problems to the rules laid down by Christian Science, the analysis of worry brings enlightenment. Worry is fear,—fear of the consequences of past actions or misfortunes, or apprehension of what may happen in the future. Fear of course implies uncertainty or ignorance, and unquestionably the cure of ignorance lies in the acquirement of knowledge, which must resolve ignorance into nothingness, exactly as light does darkness.

Every action manifested in human experience comes as a result of an impulse of mind. To make the scientific continuation of this statement is to say that good actions are impulses of the divine Mind made manifest, and that all evil actions are emanations of the mortal or carnal mind, which "is enmity against God." For a space, however, let us consider the human problem. The human mind is concerned with two things, the past and the future. In matters of the present it is wholly unconcerned. Every thought legacy from the past may be resolved into two elements, sorrow or joy,—sorrow, a negation, the absence of joy, no thing; joy, the divine gift, the emblem and proof of infinite good. It is not difficult to credit each of these mementos of the past to its proper source.

Humanity faces the future with confidence or doubt, with sensations which may be analyzed into the two opposites, hope or fear, and it may be asserted as a foregone conclusion that as long as one relies on the mind which has up to now brought sorrow, he will realize the only possible results,—fear, failure, sickness, defeat, dishonor, death; which unpleasant terms are components of hell. Reliance on the divine Mind, which has given us all our lasting joy, brings hope, success, health, victory, honor, life,—the myriad blessings which are heaven.

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True Worship
October 18, 1919
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