Article September 30, 1939 Issue

Competition

[Written Especially for Young People]

EMMA EASTON NEWMAN

Once a high school pupil asked a Christian Science practitioner how it could be considered ethical to rely on the power of Christian Science treatment to help him in anything competitive—in examinations, debates, or games. He could not see how it would be Christlike to hope to outdo another.

At the time, the elder Scientist had not considered the question as presented in that light. The answer, however, came readily because the source from which a Christian Scientist properly draws his answers is not from the storehouse of limited personal experience, but from inexhaustible divine intelligence, God. The answer given was that each one may rightly compete against his own past performance. He may properly outdo his past human sense of himself by more complete reliance on such spiritual qualities as strength, courage, resourcefulness, and perseverance.

The Isthmian games played on, and named after that most striking geographic feature of Greece—the great Isthmus of Corinth—appear to have furnished St. Paul with many of his telling similes. These games, occurring as they did every two years, formed a prominent part in the life and thought of those living in the near-by city of Corinth. It was natural and pertinent that the apostle, in addressing a letter to the Christian converts there, should use the foot race as the basis of his illustration; "Every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible."

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