Article January 3, 1920 Issue

The human will is regarded as that faculty whereby men...

The Christian Science Monitor

The human will is regarded as that faculty whereby men freely choose or reject a thing. It apparently enables a man to choose the good or the evil course, as he may elect, and many believe that almost anything toward which a man directs his ambition can be accomplished through the exercise of the human will. When, however, events, disasters, and desolations appear, which the mortal will has been powerless to avert, the human mind looks about for a cause or will outside of its own, and, with sublime inconsistency, attributes the inexplicable evils, which are its own subjective state, to the workings of the will of God.

There are few persons who would not immediately concede that God is good. They are not so ready to assert that God's will is seen only in the operation of good, for, although men have been taught that they must submit to the inscrutable wisdom of God, when they consider the reversals, the sicknesses, and sorrows, through which they have been bereaved, it seems to them very much as if an evil is wrought in their lives, even if it is, as they suppose, wrought by the will of God. This human confusion, this false supposition that, in some mysterious way, the will of God works through evil that good may come, is due to the corporeal conception of God and man. The human will is capable of evil as well as of a human sense of good, for it is the motive power of that mind which is supposed to exist in matter apart from God. The divine will is capable only of good, because it is the power and wisdom of unchanging Principle which includes no element of evil. Human will power constantly runs into error because it opposes the will of God, because it is a phase of the belief of material existence which wholly counterfeits the spiritual man in the likeness of God. On page 597 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy clearly discriminates between the socalled human will power and the will of God as understood in Christian Science. She writes: "Will. The motive-power of error; mortal belief; animal power. The might and wisdom of God." And a little lower in the same passage she further explains, "Will, as a quality of so-called mortal mind, is a wrong-doer; hence it should not be confounded with the term as applied to Mind or to one of God's qualities."

Jesus the Christ declared his mission to be that of revealing and demonstrating the will of God, and he explained what the effect of accepting his teachings would be for those who understood. "I came down from heaven," he said, "not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me." "And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life." It is the nature of will to act freely, for, obviously, the will cannot be compelled. The spontaneous volition of good, which Jesus the Christ revealed and demonstrated, can therefore be understood and realized only as the spurious human will gives place to the divine, for the human will has not the power to become like God. To will a thing in the merely human way is simply to manifest a carnal or animal propensity; but to will only as God wills is to have the false sense of will healed through the Mind of the Christ and to gain the power of the Christ over sin, disease, and death, and to be governed by the law of infinite harmony. It is, in short, as Paul wrote to the Romans, to be "transformed by the renewing of your mind" in order to "prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."

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