Editorial August 19, 1939 Issue

Science, Not Suffering

George Shaw Cook

Jesus at one time said to his disciples: "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." When examined in the light of Christian Science, there is nothing in the foregoing declaration of the Master to indicate that he required of his followers that they surrender their human lives in order to prove their discipleship. In other words, Jesus was not advocating martyrdom as a proof of Christianity. What he did require of his followers was that they give up their material concept of life and attain the spiritual understanding of Life as God. Thus interpreted, there is profound meaning in the words, "Whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it."

Christ Jesus knew that only through sacrificing a finite sense of life can one fully understand that the only Life of the real man is infinite Spirit, divine Mind. Through gaining a knowledge of the fact that God, Spirit, Mind, is man's Life, and that man is forever coexistent with Life, one does not lose anything worth while, but gains all that is of real value. Therefore, scientific sacrifice is a gaining, rather than a losing process. The self that Jesus wanted his followers to deny was the material or mortal sense of self, not the true spiritual selfhood, which cannot be denied.

Christian Science shows that the way of salvation taught by Christ Jesus is not the way of continual suffering. It enables one to see that the way out of the flesh is not the way of suffering, but of Science. Christ, Truth, in Christian Science teaches that the way to be saved is to turn in thought from the belief that sin and suffering are real to the forever fact that spiritual being, as the expression of God, is sinless and painless. To gain a sinless, painless, deathless state of consciousness is to dispense with the belief that suffering and death are any part of real being.

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