Editorial August 19, 1933 Issue

The Feast, not Excuses

Violet Ker Seymer

Bible students are familiar with Christ Jesus' reference to the feast to which guests were bidden but of which many deprived themselves through their belief in counterattractions. "They made light of it," we read, "and went their ways." What are these ways? Temporal and disappointing. Mrs. Eddy writes (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 130): "When all men are bidden to the feast, the excuses come. One has a farm, another has merchandise, and therefore they cannot accept." Whatever may be their daily vocations, Christian Scientists are silently partaking of that feast of Spirit whereby pursuits of lesser value are gradually exchanged for higher ones. The supposed goal of so-called material happiness grows indistinct and vanishes as one attempts to grasp it, for there is no such goal, because that which is best in human consciousness sooner or later tires of that which is not in line with spiritual progress and turns from it.

Perhaps none are more surprised than men and women, hitherto not interested in religion, who discover in Christian Science a satisfying and logical teaching through which they find themselves gaining a workable understanding of divine Principle. Christian Science forwards that spiritual awakening through which one understands and proves that man in God's likeness is not sick but well, is not sinful but sinless, is not poor but abundantly blessed, is not helpless but efficient, is not sad but joyous. Through partaking of the feast of Spirit with spiritual sense one exchanges the old "spirit of heaviness" for the new "garment of praise," sickness for health and sin for righteousness.

Who, pausing to weigh values, would make light of spiritual progress, of health, holiness, heaven, typified by the feast? Spiritual awakening is not for the few, but for all, since Christian Science bids "all men" come to the feast. Sometimes the excuse is that one is either too young or too old, too sick or too conservative, too satisfied with doctrinal beliefs and apparent prosperity, to care to shape his views and his daily life according to the teachings of Christian Science. Or else the suggestion presents itself that one is too intellectual, too busy, or too humanly successful to do so, and that religion is for the idle and the artless, or for those who fail. Through Christian Science, however, one grasps rather than gropes for the essentially needed spiritual ideal and the way of its attainment, and so outgrows materiality with all its discord and limitation.

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