Editorial February 18, 1922 Issue

Honesty Fundamental

Albert F. Gilmore

Christian Science brings home to every students with peculiar emphasis the necessity for unqualified honesty in purpose and practice, as a fundamental requisite to spiritual progress. Our Leader has so plainly taught that it has become axiomatic with her students, when there is error in the premise the result cannot be free from the baneful effects of error; that is to say, the results from a supposed cause inherently wrong are never right, else we should have the anomalous situation of good resulting from evil, a manifest impossibility. Truth is never consequent upon falsity. Wrong desires, conceived in selfishness, seeking gratification of any phase of the personal ambition which all too commonly accompanies human experience, can be of no possible assistance in gaining that consciousness which constitutes the Mind of Christ. To insure spiritual growth Mrs. Eddy declares on page 449 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "You should practice well what you know, and you will then advance in proportion to your honesty and fidelity,—qualities which insure success in the Science." Christian Scientists well know the scrupulous care exercised by our Leader, to place before the world in such terms as could be understood, the precepts and example of true Christianity as operative in Christian Science. The great success of her effort proves beyond the possibility of cavil that she was guided by divine Truth, impeccable, unchangeable, eternal, in which dishonesty and selfish ambition have no place.

Honesty is a moral quality of the so-called human mind. In the "Scientific Translation of Mortal Mind" (Science and Health, p. 115), Mrs. Eddy places honesty in the second degree where, with the disappearance of evil beliefs, improved human qualities are manifest. These in turn give place to the attributes of Spirit, the ideas of Mind, signalizing that awakening in His likeness with which the psalmist declared he would be satisfied. It is conclusive that progress in gaining the Christ-idea is experienced only by those who earnestly strive to grasp and express the higher concept, working from a basis of spiritual integrity in purpose and method, supplemented and supported by prayerful endeavor to follow in the footsteps of the great Demonstrator; and this standard of loyalty admits of no slightest deviation from the high demands of Spirit.

The old adage which declares honesty to be the best policy falls far short of the true idealism taught by our Leader. Not for the sake of policy which smacks of expediency, subordinating the moral issue to what may mistakenly be thought necessary to success, but because nothing less than honesty ever demonstrates divine Principle, this is the rule to be followed in Christian Science. Truth for truth's sake, persistently pursued, is the invariable demand of scientific unfoldment. Honesty in thought is the antecedent of right action. To yield to the suggestion of a dishonest thought is not only to submit to its control, but also to admit its reality, thus establishing in belief a false state of consciousness apart from God.

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