Article January 1, 1938 Issue

True Expectancy

MARGARET H. ANDERSON

On page 1 of her work "Pulpit and Press" Mrs. Eddy has written, "A new year is a nursling, a babe of time, a prophecy and promise clad in white raiment, kissed—and encumbered with greetings—redolent with grief and gratitude." It is indeed true that whatever may have been the nature of our human experiences—joy or sorrow, success or disappointment—each New Year is welcomed with bright expectancy, and is generally regarded as an occasion for the expression of kindly greetings to all those with whom we come in contact. Moreover, at this season there wells up in the hearts of most people a genuine desire for the welfare and prosperity of all mankind.

True expectancy is wholly apart from apprehensiveness of evil and fear of adverse happenings. Yet the optimistic human expectancy which hopes for the best, in a blind trust that good will come along somehow, has no assured foundation, and does not afford any protection from the vagaries of chance and change. Again, expectancy which looks and longs for the acquisition of greater material possessions and power is built upon the quicksand of a mistaken sense of substance, and can never, even if effectuated, bring into human experience enduring satisfaction.

Christian Science teaches mortals that they must look out and away from belief in the reality of matter and evil, in order to behold the real man and the eternal, ever-present, harmonious facts of his spiritual being. Students of Christian Science learn to reconstruct their mental outlook on the sure foundation of scientific spiritual understanding, which reveals the all-power and ever-presence of Spirit, God, good, and the consequent powerlessness, yea, the nothingness, of matter and evil. True expectancy springs from the understanding that God has only good to give in the inexhaustible flow and affluence of spiritual ideas. These ideas of truth and beauty are ever present, forever unfolding according to God's beneficent purpose for each of His children. Hence, man's reflection or expression of spiritual ideas, in "the beauty of holiness," constitutes his true substance and inheritance. One page 552 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy has written: "Mortals must emerge from this notion of material life as all-in-all. They must peck open their shells with Christian Science, and look outward and upward."

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