Article June 5, 1920 Issue

The power of circumstances is too often admitted to be...

The Christian Science Monitor

The power of circumstances is too often admitted to be something that men cannot control. Each of us has heard it said of another that "he is the victim of circumstances." Thus recognition and acknowledgment are given to an influence which seems, to human sense, indefinable and yet inexorable, but which, to the enlightened understanding, is impotent and unreal. The average listener is ready to accept such a remark as the fact. This acceptance is due to his lack of knowledge of Principle. He sees what he believes, and believes what he sees, just as he has been educated to do. He has not been taught to think in terms of Principle.

The student of Christian Science, accepting as true Mary Baker Eddy's statement on page 397 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," that "the real jurisdiction of the world is in Mind, controlling every effect and recognizing all causation as vested in divine Mind," refuses to admit that the real man can ever be made the dupe or victim of merely material circumstances. He has learned to know man as the immortal idea of divine Love. Because man is Love's idea, he knows that man must be cared for without lapse or interval, and regardless of the circumstances that human events may seem to manifest in so-called material life. Realizing that man can never be victimized, he further insists that Principle alone is cause, that there can be no effect except from Principle. Now it must be plain that events do not just happen, as the human mind would have us believe. Order is God's law. Every real circumstance is governed by that law. God, Mind, being the one and only cause, every event, or effect, must be the logical outcome of His law.

Truth is all-powerful. The apprehension of this great fact effectively antidotes or neutralizes the mesmerism of the human mind. Accepting this false, so-called mind as causative, results in nothing but a constantly shifting panorama of errors. This mortal mind accepts these errors as real and true, but this is solely due to its ignorance of that which really is. Lacking knowledge of the real, it accepts the unreal as true. When a man wakes to find that this so-called mind is not mind at all, and learns to know Mind, God, as his Mind, then there shines into his consciousness that light of understanding which enables him to demonstrate the truth of Mrs. Eddy's admonition on page 419 of Science and Health, "Meet every adverse circumstance as its master."

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