Article April 12, 1924 Issue

Progress and Experience

REAY C. VAN DER VOORT

As the earnest student of Christian Science, after some years of honest effort to assimilate and practice its teachings, looks back over his experience, he may recognize much improvement, enlightenment, and mental freedom. If ingratitude does not interfere with his vision, the certain and evident effects of past work and study may be clearly seen. Examination will reveal a marked elevation over materialism, sin, sickness, and suffering. Simply because the complete solution of all his problems is not yet obtained, and the limitations of a mortal sense of existence still seem to press upon him, he should not therefore be blind to the progress that has been made. Great, at times, loom before the student of Christian Science the possibilities of demonstration, as he struggles to attain in practice the very mountain peaks of vision. He must, however, with patience meet and master each lesser error, and grow into a fitness for higher and larger demonstrations of God's supremacy and goodness.

As the student progresses, a calm peace gradually displaces turmoil. He finds that he is not, as he perhaps had thought, doomed to suffering from sickness or sin. He finds that the great impartial law of divine Love applies to him, as well as to those whose rejoicings for benefits received he has so often heard. He finds himself being saved from his earth-bound thinking. Startled from his material dream with its material pursuits and pleasures, he seeks all in God and ceases to agonize over his spiritual future. Gradually, too, he loses anxiety over the less important question of his worldly future, with its human necessities of food, clothing, and supply. God surely becomes known to him more and more in his experience as a loving Father-Mother.

Deep and varied sometimes may seem the experiences of the student as he advances onward towards the unchanging calm of the lasting and reliable things of Spirit; and as the harbor of certainty is approached, he longs to tell those of his companions, who have not yet come so far, of the hope he experiences and the grandeur he sees. He yearns to hold aloft to the heart of benighted humanity the light of peace and hope. He wants to tell others that, although existence once appeared to him perhaps very tragic, it has become a glorious privilege. When Christian Science tears off the covering of ignorance from temporal material living, revealing the shams of evil's hidden activities, he longs to help the one so enlightened along the way to the true, lasting, and harmonious sense of existence

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