Editorial October 20, 1928 Issue

Success

Ella W. Hoag

How dear to every human heart is success! How men love the least thought of it! How earnestly they work for it, struggle for it, pray for it! The desire for it enters into the child's earliest experiences, and goes on increasingly through his later years. The purpose to succeed is indeed one of the most universal factors in the affairs of all mankind.

All this has been associated with the belief that success is always something desirable, and that it ever implies happiness and prosperity. So largely is this true that men have come to reverence success frequently to the exclusion of consideration of the means whereby it has been achieved.

Comparatively few have realized that, as Mrs. Eddy declares in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 239), "Success in error is defeat in Truth." They have not stopped to consider that success is an effect rather than a cause. It is therefore necessary, if one would win the success which truly satisfies, that his purposes and motives be watched most carefully. Indeed, a right attitude toward this subject by the Christian Scientist must always include the position which Mrs. Eddy presents in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 147) concerning "the upright man," of whom she says, "In all his pursuits, he knows no path but the fair, open, and direct one, and would much rather fail of success than attain it by reproachable means."

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Among the Churches
October 20, 1928
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