Editorial July 14, 1934 Issue

Satisfaction

Violet Ker Seymer

A basic statement regarding satisfaction is found in Science and Health (p. 519). There Mrs. Eddy writes: "Deity was satisfied with His work. How could He be otherwise, since the spiritual creation was the outgrowth, the emanation, of His infinite self-containment and immortal wisdom?" Dissatisfaction and disease, sin, fear, poverty, good and bad luck, limited opportunity, are neither the outgrowth nor the emanation of infinite wisdom. There is no necessity for them, and no satisfaction in them. As basic spiritual satisfaction is understood and faithfully cultivated, these unsatisfactory material beliefs are put off, with their consequences.

Who can deny that in the long run "the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing"? Human nature reaches out for something beyond itself, for something beautiful and true, something beyond the scope of the physical senses, something perfect and permanent. Dissatisfaction is due to the fact that right desires are too often thwarted, and lower instincts indulged. Owing to this twofold mistake, humanity staggers under its consent to self-appointed burdens of fear, disease, sin, envy, sorrow, poverty. Dissatisfaction is banished in the measure in which one puts off the traits which produce it—those faulty traits which are a denial of each one's true manhood. Any attempt, then, to find satisfaction in unreal materiality, however affluent or ostentatious, proves futile. This fact, honestly faced, is both regenerating and comforting, because it encourages humanity to start on the discovery of man's true identity, which is glorious, victorious, even as Christ Jesus proved it to be.

Material sense, testifying only to that which is temporal, limited, and variable, can never know satisfaction. This sense, therefore, must be supplanted by spiritual sense, which knows only that which is everlasting, infinite, and invariable. Christian Science awakens the dupes of materiality and saves them from drifting into dissatisfaction or worse. It diverts the desire for satisfaction from the material to the spiritual, from the temporal to the eternal. This heaven-born desire is upheld by divine Principle and is always certain of reward. To understand in what satisfaction consists is to take the first mental step toward acquiring it. In order to rise above discordant material conditions, one must set one's self to grasp the beneficent nature of God, cause, for it is only as this discovery is made that one begins to glimpse his own divine nature. Satisfaction is inseparable from spirituality; it consists solely in reflecting God, good. Hence in deflection there is always dissatisfaction.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Items of Interest