Article January 9, 1937 Issue

Always Forward

ESSIE E. ROGERS

How many times we prolong painful human experiences and delay the complete solution of our problems through failure to go forward and prove by our actions our confidence in the truth we declare. As Christian Scientists we make scientific declarations concerning man's sonship with God and his consequent immunity from sin, sickness, lack, and unhappiness. We affirm that completeness and dominion are man's by reflection, and then if we are not alert we may find ourselves looking to material sense testimony, forgetting our Leader's counsel to "act as possessing all power from Him in whom we have our being" (Science and Health, p. 264).

We do not declare the truth in order to transform material beliefs into spiritual facts, nor on the assumption that sin, sickness, and lack are something now, but that if we declare the truth vehemently enough they will become nothing. Our sole reason for contending persistently for the truth is so to establish it in our consciousness that we shall no longer be deceived by evil's illusive claim to reality, but instead see the spiritual facts of being so clearly that evil will disappear as a false belief, and consequently as a manifestation in our experience—even as a mistake made in working out a mathematical problem vanishes before the application of the mathematical fact.

Man's perfection is a present fact, not merely a future possibility. Jesus established his thinking so absolutely on the basis of Spirit that he reckoned not at all with matter. He stood at the tomb of Lazarus with his consciousness so imbued with the allness of Life and the utter certainty of man's inseparability from Life, that he felt no urge to peer within the sepulcher to ascertain the physical state of his friend before uttering the authoritative command to "come forth." He knew with certainty that right where death and decay claimed to be, there Life was, ever present, eternal, and indestructible. He made no concession to the belief of time, and prescribed no period of resuscitation or recuperation to complete the healing. He acted as one possessing all power from God.

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