Editorial July 23, 1927 Issue

On Claiming Our Divine Rights

Albert F. Gilmore

Mrs. Eddy states unqualifiedly that divine ideas are forever unfolding perfection, since they express God through reflection. Error, on the contrary,—every belief arising from the lie of life and intelligence in matter,—seems to present a concept of man as physical and mortal, a counterfeit of the real. To this false sense of personality attach the beliefs of sin, of sickness, and of death itself. The purpose of error, if nothingness may be said to have a purpose, is to have mortals accept as real that which is unreal, utterly false. So far as mortals accept the claims of sense—false witnesses—as true, so far will they pass through the experiences which commonly attach to humanity.

Christian Scientists, however, are demonstrating that these results are not inevitable, are not ordained of God, and therefore may be overcome through claiming man's divine rights and holding to the truth about God and His perfect expression, man. As one persists in this process, progress is made in breaking the shackles which seem to bind mortals. When writing on profession and proof of divine power's availability to destroy the claim of error, Mrs. Eddy states on page 233 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "This [destruction of error] is an element of progress, and progress is the law of God, whose law demands of us only what we can certainly fulfil." As Christian Scientists we should claim, even demand, the divine rights which belong to the children of God. And, moreover, since progress is the law which governs the universe of divine ideas, we claim progress and it becomes manifest in our experience.

The Christian Science practitioner holds firmly to the law of progress, God's law. Despite the evidence which material sense may undertake to present, he holds understandingly, and therefore firmly, to the spiritual fact of progress, of man's continuous unfoldment. This position persistently held to as man's true status breaks the mesmerism which denies progress and would even suggest retrogression and relapse. Since the law of progress governs man, we may know that man continually unfolds, and furthermore that this change is always in the line of progression, not retrogression.

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