Editorial January 6, 1934 Issue

Holding Our Position

Violet Ker Seymer

Christian Science entirely changes one's mental attitude toward health, happiness, power, achievement. It enables one to take a new and true position as God's witness, and to maintain it through obedience to the rules of Christian Science. It diverts reliance on matter to reliance on infinite Mind. It overthrows the false gods of pleasurable or painful sensation and establishes in human consciousness the worship of the true God. Many are the victories won over sickness, fear, sin, and sorrow through this right mental attitude. Many are the rewards of well-placed faith, blossoming into spiritual understanding and fruition.

In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 167) Mrs. Eddy writes, "It is not wise to take a halting and half-way position or to expect to work equally with Spirit and matter, Truth and error." Sickness and sin indicate false mental conditions objectified on the physical body, but never produced by it. Both are products of the carnal mind, which is "enmity against God," and enmity against God's likeness. Therefore one must realize one's identity as God's witness if he would reflect God's dominion. Sickness, which is a mortal belief, can be destroyed only by the operation of divine Mind. A material remedy cannot destroy sickness any more than it can destroy sin. One would not expect to cure jealousy, sorrow, hate, or impatience by dosing, massaging, or operating on the physical body. Equally futile is it to imagine that one can eradicate mental pictures of disease, inaction, paralysis, deformity, by material means. Faith in material remedies, so called, leaves one morally unimproved, spiritually unawakened. In Christian Science the office of preaching the gospel and that of healing the sick are allied in and by divine Mind.

One who, employing no material means, has been healed of sickness through Christian Science, cannot but feel that he is on the threshold of a new world and it is for him to enter it. He can be helped toward it, but none can enter the realm of divine Mind save through his own undeviating mental footsteps. Hence the need that students of Christian Science should put off trust in matter, which means distrust of Mind. Some mistakenly believe that disease is more difficult to heal through Christian Science than are faults of character. But since both disease and sin are destroyed by spiritual understanding, this proves the nothingness of both these phases of error. Sickness is largely fear made manifest on the body, fear of climate, heredity, food, constitution. No one will dispute the fact that fear is mental, and that matter cannot cure this mental malady or its physical consequences. Divine Love alone brings release from the tyrant of fear in proportion as this Love is reflected. Fear cannot cling to the obedient thinker, the one who thinks according to the teachings of Christian Science and applies them.

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