Article September 6, 1924 Issue

Unity and Cooperation

SALLIE POOLE LANGE

One of the greatest problems confronting the world to-day is how to bring into human experience greater unity and cooperation. Everywhere we see the need of this: nations, states, cities, churches, schools, business concerns are struggling to learn something of it, and how to demonstrate it; but the difficulty lies in the fact that the world is trying to bring out unity from a material standpoint, looking to material methods to accomplish the result. This is, however, impossible, as our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, has so clearly shown in her definition in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 162) where she says, "Unity is spiritual cooperation." Human thought, seems to be deeply engrossed in the errors of materiality and personality; and it is only as it is turned away from these errors unreservedly to divine Principle, God, that we begin to prove, through living as well as teaching, that unity and cooperation are spiritual.

Paul had a clear apprehension of this when he wrote to the Ephesians: "I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. ... Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." In this admonition Paul sets forth three conditions necessary to progress: first, that we are to manifest the qualities of divine Mind—humility, meekness, faithfulness, and charity; secondly, that we are to strive to keep constantly before us the necessity of our unity with God; thirdly, that by overcoming the false beliefs of the carnal mind, which is ever at enmity against God, we shall, through faith and understanding, come "unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

Every human heart desires at some time to know God and to do that which is just and right; but this desire is often stifled by the errors of envy, hatred, jealousy, greed, selfrighteousness, and self-justification. In order to overcome these false beliefs and bring out true unity and cooperation, something more than mere desire to work in harmony is requisite. Our Leader tells us in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 254): "The human self must beevangelized. This task God demands us to accept lovingly to-day, and to abandon so fast as practical the material, and to work out the spiritual which determines the outward and actual."

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