Editorial January 10, 1925 Issue

Self-Abnegation

Ella W. Hoag

There is nothing that the Christian Scientist desires more earnestly to attain than real self-abnegation. He knows that between him and the realization of all spiritual good there claim to stand the beliefs in selfishness, which shut out from his present consciousness that heavenly sense which belongs to him as the child of God. When the light of Christian Science first dawns upon him, he may imagine himself to be very unselfish. He may even have believed that he was living entirely for the purpose of making others comfortable and happy. Although from a human standpoint he may appear to have sacrificed himself in service to others, unless that service has been based upon the truth of spiritual being it cannot be said to have been truest self-abnegation.

Mrs. Eddy tells us in "Science and Health with Key tothe Scriptures" (p. 231), "Unless an ill is rightly met and fairly overcome by Truth, the ill is never conquered." Unless self-abnegation, therefore, includes the truth of man's necessity to express only that which is of God, good, unless one sees that only as he knows and demonstrates the truth that apart from God he can do nothing, one has not yet touched the hem of the garment of self-abnegation, nor can he prove scientifically the unreality of the claims of evil. No ill can possibly be truly met and mastered without sufficient relinquishment of a false sense of selfhood to enable one to start with the recognition of the true selfhood as existent in divine Mind.

That self-sacrifice which believes it is giving up something real in order that it may bless others, which looks for recognition by others of what it considers its worthy acts,—this is not that unselfed love which seeks its own blessedness in reflecting love to others.

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