Editorial July 26, 1924 Issue

Self-Examination

Albert F. Gilmore

Few persons, it seems, until instructed in Christian Science, realize the importance of habitually undergoing mental self-examination. Many, no doubt, refrain from such examination because of failure to understand its value; more, perhaps, because of fearing to come face to face with their own innermost thoughts,—their desires, aims, ambitions, loves, and hates. The so-called mortal mind lacks confidence in itself because it doubts its own integrity. Yet, not having a substitute for its erroneous beliefs, it is in no wise desirous of relinquishing what it calls its best, though that best be evil. Fear of disillusionment keeps many an earnest person from undergoing that degree of self-examination necessary to uncover the falsity of his concepts; for with such, disillusionment is thought to mean oblivion. Having little or no conception of Truth, mortal mind knows no refuge, has no stable abiding place to which it can repair; and so it clings, sometimes in despair, to its own fallacies. Mrs. Eddy has well said in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 186), "If mortal mind knew how to be better, it would be better."

Christian Scientists learn to be grateful for the experience, however bitter it may seem at the time, which compels self-examination. By this process lurking evil which, perhaps, one is cherishing all unconsciously, is uncovered to be destroyed. The mortal or canal mind, which claims to simulate the infinity of divine Mind, seems to afford a vast storehouse for an accumulation of false belief of great variety,—all counterfeits of the ideas of divine Mind. These erroneous thoughts in belief include the whole round of human experience, constituting in their totality that vast background which finds expression in the so-called individual mortal mentality. In its seeming totality it claims the omnipotence and omnipresence of divine Mind.

The student of Christian Science, learning that the beliefs of the so-called mortal mentality are erroneous, immediately begins to exchange the false for the true, well knowing that a concept once seen as false, or as a counterfeit, has no quality of reality, no true identity, and, in consequence, has not even a claim to reality. Under the marginal heading "Vision opening," in Science and Health (p. 428), Mrs. Eddy says, "To divest thought of false trusts and material evidences in order that the spiritual facts of being may appear,—this is the great attainment by means of which we shall sweep away the false and give place to the true." And she adds, "Thus we may establish in truth the temple, or body, 'whose builder and maker is God.'" Manifestly, the body so established is spiritual consciousness, that state of consciousness which knows only the truth of being, including the facts concerning God, man, and the spiritual universe. When this state is reached, all erroneous beliefs will have disappeared and man as God's image will be manifest. This process is the transformation which Paul so earnestly urged upon his fellow-Christians.

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