Article March 18, 1922 Issue

Spiritual Understanding versus Human Will

SAMUEL F. SWANTEES

Christian Science healing is never the result of the action of human will. In the Preface to "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. xi) Mrs. Eddy says: "The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation." Human will, therefore, has really nothing to do with the process of healing, except that it is forced to give way to Christ, Truth. Rarely, if ever, is this giving up of human will to Christ, Truth, accomplished without many a struggle, and in these struggles strange things often seem to occur, among which the strangest and most deceptive is, that the human will actually seems to warn us against itself. When we, for instance, perceiving the truth, gladly rejoice in it, or perhaps when we vehemently declare the word of God against the temptation to believe in the power of sin and disease, then human will seems immediately to spring up out of its dark nowhere in order to warn us. It says: That is will-power you are using and not the truth. Again, when we are speaking with spiritual authority, even as did our Master, human will seems especially alert to warn us, assuring us that this is not the right way to proceed.

A slight analysis of what seems to occur discloses that human will, instead of kindly warning us against its own misuse, is really striving to deceive us so as to make us stop declaring the truth, and to mystify us, also causing us to doubt our own understanding of God and Christian Science. Right here, then, we easily discover the main business or activity of so-called will-power or human will; for if human will can once convince a student of Christian Science that he does not understand this Science sufficiently to know how to declare Truth aright, or that these declarations of Truth are but the words of human will, that student is bound to cease in his efforts to know and to understand the truth, and will wonder blindly why spiritual progress and scientific demonstration are so difficult to attain.

Human will, as it is better understood, is found to be the basis of self-righteousness and self-justification, bringing forth the Pharisee rather than the Christ. It is spiritual ignorance or blindness, constantly seeking to discount spiritual understanding. As Mrs. Eddy says on page 445 of Science and Health, "the human will which maketh and worketh a lie, hiding the divine Principle of harmony, is destructive to health, and is the cause of disease rather than its cure." Plainly speaking, then, human will-power is in the business of lying, always working deceitfully. It is always the enemy, never the friend, of the true God and His Christ; hence it is easily seen that when human will is most active in denouncing what we are doing in Science, we may be most nearly right.

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