Article March 29, 1919 Issue

"Well placed confidence"

HUGH STUART CAMPBELL

In the trend of daily affairs one of the mental qualifications deemed necessary to assure the success of a given purpose or project is confidence. Indeed, the educated belief in the desirability of this quality of thought is so fixed in human consciousness that it is customary to look with skepticism upon an undertaking which is entered upon with an absence of confidence, notwithstanding the fact that frequently confidence, as a mortal views it, is but a cultivated boldness or bravado primarily used to gain an objective. Taken at its best, human confidence is but a mask, an uncertain mental attitude, deceived and deceiving. How fleeting and unreal it is when a word, a deed, a look, may change it into distrust! How easily it is abused and misused!

So long as confidence is dependent on human personality it is a servant of human will. For instance, a burglar could be very confident of success in a dishonest act. One can be quite confident that it will rain to-day or that there will be a frost before morning. Again, one might have implicit confidence in another's ability, strength, or courage, and through a misunderstanding or suspicion lose that confidence in an instant, thereby proving that the world's belief in what it terms confidence is nothing but an unreal concept of the human mind. Now the confidence inspired by Christian Science is born of God. It is an unfaltering trust in God's protecting power, based upon an intelligent understanding of what God is and of His law. It always was, is, and ever will be perfect. As a spiritual quality it cannot be changed or lost. It is assurance that "whatever is possible to God, is possible to man as God's reflection," to quote our Leader'swords on page 183 of "Miscellaneous Writings," and the reason is expressed in a well-known hymn (Hymnal, p. 40),—

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