Article February 7, 1925 Issue

"The genius of Christian Science"

NORFLEETE PLATT

Our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, writes in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 356): "The second stage of mental development is humility. This virtue triumphs over the flesh; it is the genius of Christian Science." Until the conviction that Christian Science is the way to divine Life sweeps our thoughts in a new direction, the word "humility" may have for us a meaning that we are inclined to avoid as uncomfortable, as involving a sort of loss of caste. But daily study of our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, presents to our unfolding thought a new concept of humility and its important place in our progress.

The old belief, of which we must disencumber ourselves, is that humility is a state of resignation and inertia,—that we must resign all the good things of life and endure such sacrifice with what patience we may. But such is not the true situation. Right activity is a constituent part of purified thought; it prevails and triumphs. It is stable when assailed by the sophistries of material temptation, and is the atmosphere in which false suggestions fail to prosper.

A standard dictionary defines humility as "modesty, self-abasement;" and egotism as "self-exaltation, vanity." Humility is the result of the revolutionary, reformatory period in which we begin to perceive the nothingness of material selfhood: it is the forerunner of the understanding of divine Love, which wipes out the image of the beast. We shall not willingly seek this unselfed mental state until we are persuaded that there is but one God, infinite good, and but the real spiritual man, the man of God's creating.

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