Article December 17, 1921 Issue

Variance and Emulations

WANDA WILLSON WHITMAN

Under the marginal heading "Reflected likeness" Mrs. Eddy has written on page 515 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "Your mirrored reflection is your own image or likeness. If you lift a weight, your reflection does this also. If you speak, the lips of this likeness move in accord with yours. Now compare man before the mirror to his divine Principle, God. Call the mirror divine Science, and call man the reflection. Then note how true, according to Christian Science, is the reflection to its original." Students of Christian Science are grateful for Mrs. Eddy's use, in this and in many other passages, of the word reflection to indicate man's relationship to God. It is diffi cult to imagine another expression so clearly descriptive of this relationship. That the real man reflects eternal life, because God is Life; truth, because God is Truth; love, because God is Love; that he can never lack intelligence, since he reflects infinite Mind; that he can do all things necessary and good through reflection of the energy and power of Spirit; these truths, when understood in Christian Science, have proved the remedy for countless physical or mental errors.

This idea of constant reflection is efficacious not only against physical ills but also against the errors of the carnal mind which is the supposititious cause of these ills, and so it is particularly helpful in preventing the development of two "works of the flesh" included by Paul in his list found in the fifth chapter of Galatians. "Variance" is one; "emulations" is the other. It is interesting that these two errors should thus be placed side by side, for the first thought is surely that one precludes the other. On the contrary, the two have the same root, the human mind's belief in personality.

When Paul warned mankind against the sin of variance he of course meant variance from Principle, not variance from established custom, for Paul himself never hesitated for a moment to depart, and to advise others to depart, from the way of the world when he knew that way to be wrong. It is impossible to avoid the variance of the true from the seeming. This, however, is quite a different thing from what Paul meant. The sort of variance that he referred to was variance from Principle and from the real man, the sort expressed in the Pharisee's prayer: "God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are." The Pharisee was indeed unlike the real man, and he failed accordingly to manifest the real man's constant communion with or reflection of Principle, for, in the significant words of the parable, he prayed thus not to God but "with himself." Self is as far as such a prayer could go, and self, of course, was what the Pharisee really worshipped. Here, in self-worship, is seen exactly what the belief in variance amounts to, a belief which can be destroyed only by the constant reflection of unvarying Truth. In the article "Little Gods," on page 255 of "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy writes: "It is sometimes said, cynically, that Christian Scientists set themselves on pedestals, as so many petty deities; but there is no fairness or propriety in the aspersion. Man is not equal to his Maker. That which is formed is not cause, but effect; and has no underived power." When the fact that man has no underived power is constantly remembered, there is no opportunity for variance from Truth.

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