Editorial September 19, 1925 Issue

Self-Forgetfulness

Ella W. Hoag

The world has done much talking about self-forgetfulness. It has been advocated by all sorts of people, in all sorts of ways, at all sorts of times. It is held up to view to the children of most Christian parents from their earliest childhood as desirable of attainment. These children are educated to believe that to accomplish self-forgetfulness is the sure way to reach a future heaven. In spite of all this, the ability to forget self does not yet seem to have become the rule of human living.

While the honest effort to be self-forgetful has resulted successfully to some degree in the world at large, men are still feeling that they should be more completely unselfish. They have not seen how to stop thinking of a selfhood around which there seems to circle the whole of their mortal existence. Try as they may to live for others, they have seemed to be turned back, almost ruthlessly, to the contemplation of their own human selfhood, its insistent demands for attention, its apparent necessities. Still they have felt there must be some way to obey perfectly Jesus' command, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself;" for here again is that same call to self-abnegation, to that self-forgetfulness through which every right-minded person feels there must be won the happiness for which all are insistently and perpetually yearning.

When Christian Science came revealing the distinction between the true and a false selfhood, it opened the door to an understanding of what self-forgetfulness really means. Teaching as it does that spiritual man, made in the image and likeness of God, good, is the only real man, it emphasizes Jesus' statement that the belief in a material man is of the devil, evil, and therefore is not the true selfhood. It therefore shows definitely that only that which is false, that which is evil, that which is unlike God and His Christ, can ever be forgotten, can ever be renounced.

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