Article August 29, 1931 Issue

Wrestlers

FLORENCE IRENE GUBBINS

STUDENTS of Christian Science are sometimes surprised and perplexed because they find they must continue to win their promised land, instead of sauntering into it through paths of flowers, after perhaps one initial struggle. Like the Israelites of old, they must overcome the Hivites and Jebusites and all the other inhabitants of the land of Canaan — the unredeemed human consciousness.

In the twenty-third chapter of Exodus we read that God promised His chosen people that He would send before them His angel, and that this angel would bring them unto their enemies in order that these enemies should be destroyed. We, too, find that our very advance in spiritual understanding leads us into encounters with our adversary, our belief in evil as real; and it is comforting to remember that the mighty angel, Christian Science, goes before us to destroy our foes. The Scripture reads, "And I will cut them off." Not through our human efforts, but through Truth, active in our consciousness, is the enemy overcome.

Are we going to leave these Canaanites in possession of the land, because it is so much pleasanter to lie down under green trees than it is to resist the enemy? Remember, they have been there a very long time in collective as well as individual belief, and until Christian Science came, their legitimate ownership of the land was for the most part undisputed. Therefore an encounter between our understanding of Truth and the belief in error is inevitable, and we are glad to go forth in the footsteps of the great angel, Christian Science. This conflict, as Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, tells us in her work, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 288), is "the suppositional warfare between truth and error" and "is only the mental conflict between the evidence of the spiritual senses and the testimony of the material senses, and this warfare between the Spirit and flesh will settle all questions through faith in and the understanding of divine Love."

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