Editorial August 22, 1931 Issue

Evangelizing the Human Self

Duncan Sinclair

"What must I do to be saved?" How often has this cry gone up from the heart of humanity because of the instinctive longing to be better, purer, worthier, nobler! And with the genuine Christian there is ever the desire to be more Christlike. Why is this? It is because of the yearning after the real, the enduring, the eternal, the perfect—the yearning after good; and it is prophetic of the time when good shall be recognized and demonstrated by all to the exclusion of every evil belief. "What must I do to be saved?" is the questioning cry for holiness, which will not be stilled. The fact that it is so persistently made necessitates an answer which will meet the human need.

Mankind, then, longs for the evangelization of the human self. But how is this to be accomplished? Christian Science gives the method. This Science teaches the truth about the real man and exposes the false beliefs concerning him. It teaches that man is the image of God, as does the Bible, and that he is therefore perfect, reflecting the qualities of God, who is infinitely good. By doing so Christian Science makes clear the fact that certain of the qualities manifested by men, qualities which are not good, have no reality since they are not of God, infinite good. It is these false qualities which must be got rid of by the demonstration of the real qualities of Spirit; and the process may be termed the evangelization of the human self.

It should be noted particularly that our real spiritual selfhood needs no evangelizing, since the real man is perfect, but that the human sense of self needs it, since evil beliefs appear to exist in human consciousness along with spiritual qualities. In "Science and Health with Key to theScriptures" (p. 254) Mrs. Eddy writes: "But the human self must be evangelized. This task God demands us to accept lovingly to-day, and to abandon so fast as practical the material, and to work out the spiritual which determines the outward and actual." The situation must be faced by all: The real man, the man of God's creating, is perfect; but mortals believe in matter and evil as if they were real, with all that seems to follow of sorrow, sin, and suffering. It is this false material or evil sense which must be abandoned, which must be replaced by the true spiritual sense of real being.

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