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.

Christian Science teaches that patient correction of every form of false belief is necessary. False belief is evil, as surely as evil is false belief; and to permit evil's activity in one's thinking is certain to ultimate sooner or later in some form of its discordant expression, in sin, disease, limitation, loss, or death.

Christ Jesus, the incomparable demonstrator of God's law of good, invariably dealt with evil as a falsity to be destroyed; and his teaching and example afford many lessons and proofs of his exercise of the right sense of patience, and his rejection of its opposite. It is recorded by Matthew that, in replying to Peter's query, "How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?" Jesus said, "Until seventy times seven." This implies that no matter how long error may have claimed activity in one's experience, or in one's concept of another, one must deny error's verity until belief in it as a reality disappears. In answering "seventy times seven" Jesus may be regarded as having used a superlative term which Peter would understand to mean that he must completely and utterly destroy his false sense of his brother, no matter how real the offense seemed to be.

On one occasion, as recorded by Luke, when Jesus was tempted by the devil, false belief, he instantly denied it admittance with the sharp rebuke, "Get thee behind me, Satan." His vigorous and unhesitating rebuke promptly uncovered and silenced the error.

Patience, then, rightly understood, is a virtue only when it serves to keep human thought constant, alert, and calm during the process of clearing it of all falsities. The sense of patience is perverted when it would descend into an apathetic endurance of anything that is unlike God, good. Let us, then, have patience in perfecting our mental work of accepting and demonstrating the truth about God and man, and denying the false evidence of the material senses. This attainment will eventuate in finding our true spiritual selves, perfect and entirely free of every false belief; for thus does divine Love "move upon the waters of mortal mind, and form the perfect concept."

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