Article November 6, 1937 Issue

"The warfare with one's self"

LILA P. BASEL

In the priceless article entitled "Obedience," in "Miscellaneous Writings," our revered Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, has written (p. 118), "Be of good cheer; the warfare with one's self is grand; it gives one plenty of employment, and the divine Principle worketh with you,—and obedience crowns persistent effort with everlasting victory." How comforting to realize that divine Principle is working with us! What encouraging words with which to meet that persistent foe—the false sense of self, with its self-centered and self-embound thinking! And do not these words recall to thought the joyous words of the Master, Christ Jesus, "Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world"?

The worldly concept of warfare is that of a struggle for supremacy between two foes. The Christian Scientist's warfare is the struggle to overcome the false testimony of material sense. The belief that one has a selfhood of his own apart from God, that he has a life of his own, an inheritance of fleshly ills, hereditary traits, a limited supply, or that he is growing old and weary, must go down and out before the realization that his true inheritance is good and abundant, his life eternal and secure, his disposition loving and lovable.

When an individual is first awakened to the truth as taught in Christian Science, he has begun, whether he knows it or not, to wage this warfare to overcome the testimony of material sense. He may be desirous of receiving his healing from physical disease, to be assisted in his endeavor to gain supply, or to be freed from some enslaving habit. But beyond and above all these benefits, he must learn to correct his thinking and overcome the error of belief which underlies the enslavement. Usually, he will find that some form of selfishness is its base. It may be self-love, self-glorification, self-pity, self-justification, or opinionatedness. But whatever its name, it is a belief in a selfhood apart from God, which, in the light of Christian Science, we know is untrue and impossible, for true selfhood is wholly spiritual.

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