Article February 27, 1932 Issue

When Patience Is a Virtue

MARGARET L. MARSHALL

Patience has been called a virtue, but the alert Christian Scientist discriminates in his interpretation of the term, repudiating the sense of patience as leniency toward error in any form. To be patient with error would be to ascribe power to evil, directly or indirectly. One who is striving to prove the Science of Christianity in healing himself and others in the way taught by Christ Jesus, and explained in Christian Science, does not admit to his consciousness error or evil in any form.

Evil has no power of its own. It must have a witness who believes in its suppositious power. No one delights in pain, suffering, loss, and sorrow; and no one would ever seem to fall a victim to these were it not for the voluntary or involuntary consent to evil as real. This consent is the result of false material sense, which accepts the lie that matter has power to give pleasure and pain. Patience with error, then, is the very antithesis of a virtue, of the steadfast, loving endeavor to overcome error.

Let us consider patience in the way Mrs. Eddy counsels her students to do when she writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 454), "Wait patiently for divine Love to move upon the waters of mortal mind, and form the perfect concept." Is not this a true interpretation of James' words, "Let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing"? We can see that this true sense of patience means a calm and quiet perseverance in the endeavor to realize the perfection of God and of man in His image and likeness, instead of accepting the false mental image of man as material. As individual thinking is thus disciplined, healing inevitably results.

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