Editorial August 21, 1937 Issue

The Question of Forsaking

Violet Ker Seymer

With customary vividness the prophet Isaiah describes the continuous purging of mortal beliefs by the power of Spirit, until, as he records, "there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land." Humanity's concept of religion usually associates sacrifice solely with the forsaking of sinful pleasures. Yet the true sense of religion enables one to forsake the equally illicit human beliefs of disease, decrepitude, poverty, and so on.

In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy writes (p. 400), "Mortals obtain the harmony of health, only as they forsake discord, acknowledge the supremacy of divine Mind, and abandon their material beliefs." This forsaking and this acknowledgment are illuminating and liberating. The student of Christian Science learns that God is divine Principle, Love, and that Love finds expression in righteousness, health, and harmony. On this basis the forsaking of mental, moral, and also physical discord, becomes part of Christian practice. Some have believed that they were doing God's will by enduring suffering; but God's will is the removal of physical suffering and of that which claims to produce it. What has humanity gained by regarding materiality as the arbiter of its life, happiness, and prosperity? It has followed an elusive trail. It has lost sight of the substance of Spirit because it has held to the shadow of materiality. But in Christian Science one forsakes the temporal and disappointing for the eternal and satisfying.

The question of forsaking sin is clearly presented in Christian Science. Sin is indulged only so long as an individual regards it as pleasurable, or else as irresistibly powerful. In both these respects, sin is a delusion and to be overcome as such. Its claim to impart pleasure and also its claim to power are invalid. Both these beliefs vanish as the spiritual fact of sinless, fearless spiritual being is discerned and demonstrated through Christian Science. Any tendency to justify or temporize with sinful thoughts and habits it rebukes, for, as Mrs. Eddy writes in her Message to The Mother Church for 1901 (pp. 14, 15), "The evil-doer receives no encouragement from my declaration that evil is unreal, when I declare that he must awake from his belief in this awful unreality, repent and forsake it, in order to understand and demonstrate its unreality." In dealing with sin, Christian Science rebukes supine leniency and advocates spiritual awakening and correction. It teaches its students that one and all may "forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding."

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