Article March 24, 1928 Issue

Overcoming Temptation

RAYMOND S. BLATCHLEY

IN his first epistle to the Corinthians Paul says, "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it." The apostle saw that the only escape from sin and mortality must come through the recognition of Truth and the abandonment of worldliness. What a haven of hope and safety is evident in the assurance that God is ever faithful—is ever at hand to guide us through the fog of human belief and allurement, and to reveal its unreality to us!

It is not a sin to be tempted; the sin is in the succumbing to temptation. We may be tempted to the limit of our endurance; but as it is God's law that His ideas are eternally free, He always will provide a way of escape. Indeed, Mind has the escape ever ready; and Mind never fails.

The only support evil can ever seem to have is what wrong thinking claims to give it. A change of base from the material to the spiritual in our thinking enables us to deny evil. Mrs. Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 99), "The calm, strong currents of true spirituality, the manifestations of which are health, purity, and self-immolation, must deepen human experience, until the beliefs of material existence are seen to be a bald imposition, and sin, disease, and death give everlasting place to the scientific demonstration of divine Spirit and to God's spiritual, perfect man."

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