Article July 22, 1939 Issue

Surrendering to God

FLORENCE IRENE GUBBINS

Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, has written that the most divine of all human experience is that of repentance. She writes in her Message to The Mother Church for 1900 (p. 15), "The Passover, spiritually discerned, is a wonderful passage over a tear-filled sea of repentance—which of all human experience is the most divine."

Repentance is often associated with extreme forms of sin, whereas everything that is not spiritual is a form of sin. Accordingly, are we not sinning while we consider existence as material, and ourselves as living in matter? A wrong view of existence includes more than actual sinful omissions or commissions. A habitual sense of being independent of Deity, with a will and an existence of our own, is a sin which all mortals need to repent of in greater or lesser degree.

Mrs. Eddy, in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 597), defines "will" in part as "the motive-power of error;" and it is clear that the majority of mankind are governed by human will, their own or another's. When through the teachings of Christian Science we are awakened to see that there is a divine Principle guiding and governing all real existence, and to perceive how far we have strayed through our ignorance of this divine fact, we let go the sense of self-sufficiency, self-will, and pride of opinion, and come upon the most divine of all human experiences—repentance, or a conscious surrender to God.

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