Article April 10, 1920 Issue

Right Thinking

ALFRED F. GOODMAN

It must be understood that constant warfare with the flesh is necessary to progress in Christian Science. Without continual effort to prevent wrong thinking we cannot attain that peace "which passeth all understanding," and this never ceasing endeavor to think rightly partakes somewhat of the nature of warfare and so might indeed be termed mental warfare. Is not the knowing of the truth and the unknowing of error more or less of a fight when error has a seeming host of false witnesses arrayed against the supremacy of God, good? True, it is the real against the unreal, light against darkness, and there can never be the least doubt as to the ultimate outcome. The battle is mental and is the struggle to admit light, to acknowledge the real. Sooner or later each one must decide for himself upon the basis of Principle just what is real and what is unreal, and this deciding or testing constitutes the battle between Spirit and the flesh. Mortals cling tenaciously to wrong thinking. The whole structure of the false claim of existence is based upon untrue or false thinking regarding God and man. For this reason every thought must be weighed and tested before it is admitted as a reality in order that wrong thoughts with their accompanying beliefs of sin, sickness, poverty, and death may not find lodgment.

We must become dissatisfied with matter. We must understand that matter from beginning to end is not real, lasting, or truly desirable. It can give us nothing of real value, nothing which is real pleasure. Until these facts are clearly understood mankind will not care to look beyond matter for something better. Once convinced that matter is undesirable, however, we are willing to turn from its fleeting joys and false claims, to the truth of being, and there find freedom. At every turn in thus changing from one basis to another, we come in contact with suggestions of material sense which whisper that we are not doing the best thing, that matter is more substantial than Spirit, its joys more real and lasting, its rewards more generous, its results more certain. It is the warding off of these suggestions which constitutes the warfare in which every active Christian Scientist is engaged to-day.

We must be nothing less than pitiless with every erroneous thought and immediately reject it. To dwell upon it as a reality for a moment is to give it entrance, and thus to cause more trouble in finally ejecting it, for ejected it must inevitably be. The only way is never to admit recognized errors, but to follow the Master, who "suffered them not to speak." Our revered Leader has placed great emphasis upon this point, as is revealed in the many references thereto in her writings. On page 288 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy says, "The suppositional warfare between truth and error is only the mental conflict between the evidence of the spiritual senses and the testimony of the material senses, and this warfare between the Spirit and flesh will settle all questions through faith in and the understanding of divine Love." Again on page 234 of the textbook she has written: "If mortals would keep proper ward over mortal mind, the brood of evils which infest it would be cleared out. We must begin with this so-called mind and empty it of sin and sickness, or sin and sickness will never cease." Farther down on the same page we read: "Sin and disease must be thought before they can be manifested. You must control evil thoughts in the first instance, or they will control you in the second. Jesus declared that to look with desire on forbidden objects was to break a moral precept."

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