Article April 21, 1928 Issue

Obligations of the Christian Scientist

ELIZABETH MARIA CORDSEN

Each individual Christian Scientist assumes sacred obligations when he becomes a member of the Christian Science church. All through her writings our revered Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, clearly sets forth numerous duties. In both Concordances to our Leader's writings we find under "obligation," in the singular and plural, and under similar terms, numerous earnest and weighty reminders. A study of these impresses the sincere student anew with all that he has undertaken when joining the Christian Science church. By faithfully striving to meet these obligations he is participating in the evangelization of the world; for the whole earth feels the power of lives lived in a Christianly scientific manner.

On page 450 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy we read, "The Christian Scientist has enlisted to lessen evil, disease, and death; and he will overcome them by understanding their nothingness and the allness of God, or good." And in our Leader's address to the National Convention in Chicago, on June 13, 1888, she propounds the query: "Men and women of the nineteenth century, are you called to voice a higher order of Science?" She answers it thus: "Then obey this call. Go, if you must, to the dungeon or the scaffold, but take not back the words of Truth" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 99). These are indeed words of great import; and they furnish the occasion for serious self-examination. Have we been intent on our duty to lessen evil in every form, or have we sometimes averred that we must be lenient with error and cannot afford to be too radical, applying perhaps, timely and untimely, the words of our Master, "Suffer it to be so now"? The injunction quoted above indicates that we must be willing to stand immovably for Truth, even unto imprisonment and death. Mistaken conservatism may mean adulteration of the truth, and it must be rectified by purification. A Christian Scientist detects error, and bars it out; his instructions are to rebuke it when necessary and when divinely directed to do so, but he does not cease to feel kindly toward those who may have become temporary channels for error. Those who view this distinction as elusive need to learn that we are engaged in living divine Science, with its unalterable, definite, divine demands—even the only Science there is.

True, we should not always be making audible and forceful onslaughts upon error, since we can adhere to Truth firmly in thought. Here, however, we must beware of being insnared into indolence and thus forgetting to throw the weight of our spiritual conviction on the side of good and right. A vigorous impersonal denial of error has frequently stopped wrong practices. When any erroneous condition comes to our attention, it is requisite that we actively deny it, insisting on the impossibility of even its seeming. Here we need not fear that we are interfering with anyone else's business, because error belongs to no one; and it is the duty of everyone who knows the truth, to rout out false belief utterly by declaring its nothingness.

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