Progress

ACCORDING to the doctrine of Christ Jesus, which is fully explained to this age in what Mrs. Eddy has discovered and named Christian Science, there is no possibility of any hindrance to progress when that progress is toward God and is directed by spiritual understanding. In her marvelous book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," beginning on page 232, Mrs. Eddy makes this statement: "There is neither place nor opportunity in Science for error of any sort. Every day makes its demands upon us for higher proofs rather than professions of Christian power. These proofs consist solely in the destruction of sin, sickness, and death by the power of Spirit, as Jesus destroyed them. This is an element of progress, and progress is the law of God, whose law demands of us only what we can certainly fulfil."

Now there may come times in the human experiences of any of us when our way seems blocked and a mesmerism of hopelessness takes hold of us. But in reality this is a time for great rejoicing for a Christian Scientist, for if he is faithful to his spiritual guidance in the face of this stoppage of unfoldment into the Christ way of thinking, he will find that he has in reality risen higher in his concept of God because of the struggle. There is no power but God, and consequently nothing to stem the tide of unfoldment in spiritual understanding. God has willed that His work is very good, and there is no other will power. Now man is God's work. God expresses himself as idea, and since God is infinite, unlimited action, His idea, image and likeness, man, can never stop unfolding as good activity. This is the law of God controlling man.

Now it is impossible to understand God as being infinite and unlimited except by knowing God as divine Mind. All human thought of anything is limited and that fact is its death knell. Everything that it conceives must die because it has no real sense of the infinite and therefore can gain no real sense of Life, for all its creation is centered in matter. But when we begin to understand that there must be true Life apart from matter we begin to understand how Life can be infinite, and then it is easy to see how this true Life can never be hindered or stopped in its unfoldment. It is the most wonderful experience that can come to one—this first glimpse of the fact that life is not in matter at all, that life is apart from all matter and is eternal. This is the beginning of the only progress there is. This is the birth of the Christ idea, and at some time it is destined to come to every one. It brings the only real joy that can come into human experience, and it brings also the greatest task there is, the giving up of the human sense of life, and letting the true meaning of existence unfold. Letting the true sense of life unfold is very easy and simple, for that is God's work, which is finished and is good; but giving up the human sense of life or human will may seem to be an impediment in the way of progress.