The New Year and Good Intentions

The first of January might quite legitimately be termed the day of good intentions. But though the morning may find the world full of hope, the evening is apt to be the evening of disappointment. Paul himself provided the motto for the almanacs of the first century, and, for that matter, of every succeeding century, when he wrote, "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do." The reason of this is very simple, if the world in its hurry would only stay to think. It is that mankind in general has no scientific standard of right and wrong. It is guided by its emotions, and its emotions are bound to play it false, for they are themselves nothing but a product of the material senses. Thus the individual attempts to approach Spirit through the avenue of the senses; and he ends, as Mrs. Eddy says, on page 360 of Science and Health, in the hopeless effort of endeavoring to follow two models: "If you try to have two models, then you practically have none. Like a pendulum in a clock, you will be thrown back and forth, striking the ribs of matter and swinging between the real and the unreal."

There is the solution of the whole problem. When a man has once grasped the very simple fact that Spirit is the only reality, he has placed his hands upon the clue which will guide him in safety amidst all the windings of the human labyrinth. He will have acquired that power of right reasoning or righteous judgment which will enable him to distinguish infallibly between good and evil. There on one side of him will lie the narrow road of sensual restriction which leads upward to the spiritual goal, and, on the other, the broad road of self-indulgence winding down into the valley of the shadow of death. And in the bitterness of the struggle the meaning of another saying of Paul's will become extremely clear to him, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Paul, however, had fought the fight long enough and honestly enough to know that Principle helps those who help themselves, so that he was one day to strike a note of triumph in his struggle. "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness."

To any one who really understands what this means, the good intentions of New Year's day become just the same as the good intentions of any other day of the year. Real good intentions are those taken at a moment when Truth has become visible, however mistily, and they have nothing whatever to do with some fleeting emotion stirred by the human senses. Such good intentions have no special virtue because they are taken on some particular day; being scientific they are true intentions, and belong not to an hour, but exist until they are fulfilled. The good intentions, in other words, which are scientific, are spiritual and are lasting; those which are destroyed through the disappointment of the failure of the moment are purely sensuous, they are of the flesh, and are of the stock of those carnal beliefs of which Mrs. Eddy writes on page 263 of Science and Health, where she says, "Carnal beliefs defraud us. They make man an involuntary hypocrite,—producing evil when he would create good, forming deformity when he would outline grace and beauty, injuring those whom he would bless."

It is perfectly easy to see how purely material are those good intentions which come with the morning and fade with the evening. To begin with, they are based on some idea of time, which is itself an entirely material conception. The man who is fighting to understand eternity has no time to waste on the suggestions of finiteness, and sees one day just as another, as an opportunity to learn more of Principle. This constitutes his effort to discover Truth, and in his success in the pursuit of Truth, as Christ Jesus explained, lies his freedom. Now in such a pursuit, to-day or tomorrow can be nothing. Imagine a great inventor or a great philosopher who sat down on the first of January to solve a problem, and failing by bedtime gave it up until the first day of the following year. The man who is in pursuit of absolute Truth is wrestling with a greater and more complex problem than all the great inventors and philosophers who have ever attacked physical or humanly intellectual problems: he is wrestling with sin in himself, and with the world's hatred of Truth, and he cannot spare a day, much less three hundred and sixty-four days from his labor. "I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work," Christ Jesus said. And, just in the same way, Mrs. Eddy wrote, on page 2 of the Message to The Mother Church for 1900, "The right thinker works; he gives little time to society manners or matters, and benefits society by his example and usefulness. He takes no time for amusement, ease, frivolity; he earns his money and gives it wisely to the world."

He, then, whose good intentions are something more than merely sensuous and ephemeral, realizes that it is failure, and not the effort prompted by Truth, that is of the moment; and that, such being the case, he must meet failure as its master, and, instead of being worsted by it, and putting off the renewal of the struggle, close with it again, at once, in the effort to overcome it. Then his good intentions become a sledge hammer of victory, for it is certain that evil must yield to Truth when it is persistently and unflinchingly attacked. This is, of course, presuming that the attack is scientifically carried out. Good intentions which are mere reflections of ignorance of Principle are simply foredoomed to failure. Good intentions scientifically conceived and put into practice without fear are incapable of defeat. Principle does not judge by good intentions, but by actions, with the result that the unscientific good intentions, being a negation of Principle, are at their best innocuous.

The very ease with which the good intentions of the New Year are allowed to lapse after the first failure to maintain them, is proof positive of this. If they had been scientifically conceived it would have been realized that one day is no more than any other in the effort of the struggle against evil. "Behold," Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation." Christ Jesus put this even more emphatically when he declared, "But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth." The eternal now does away with time, and bids man not wait for New Year's day, or the return of New Year's day, but realize that the demonstration of the truth of the omnipotence of Principle, may be carried out at any moment, if it is only carried out with that understanding of Truth which is man's natural freedom.