Scientific Insistence

Alfred Pittman

Prayer as taught by Christ Jesus, and as understood in Christian Science, is by no means a weak or faltering procedure. It may begin in the midst of great difficulties, but it rises naturally to the assurance and evidence of unqualified love and power. In its true meaning, it is a scientifically Christian activity, an expression of exact knowledge of God and His will. It is recognition that the nature of God is expressed, and that everything contrary to His nature is illegitimate, not really expressed or existent, and in no way entitled to deceive men.

It is not strange, then, that Jesus should have taught the soundness and value of insistence, indeed of what might be called a peremptory quality, in prayer; and he did this with great emphasis in two parables. On the first occasion, one of the disciples had asked him to teach them to pray; and after giving them the Lord's Prayer, and manifestly by way of showing them how it was to be used, he told of a man who went at night to a friend's house to borrow bread for a guest who had just arrived. "Trouble me not," the friend first replied (Luke 11:7). "The door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee." But Jesus continued, "I say unto you, Though he will not rise and give him, because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth."

The Master went on immediately to say, "Ask, and it shall be given you"—indicating, what indeed is obvious in Science, that in prayer the asking determines the receiving, and that any difficulty about receiving disappears in proportion as the asking is properly done.

Jesus' sense of the value of importunacy in prayer is further signified by his returning to the point in the similarly striking story of an unjust judge, whom a widow besought to avenge her of an adversary (Luke 18:3). "And he would not for a while," Jesus stated, "but afterward he said within himself, . . . Because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me." And the Saviour continued: "Hear what the unjust judge saith. And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily."

Students of Christian Science soon learn to pray with scientific insistence. It is not that God, infinite intelligence and Love, ever is reluctant to supply what is needed. He supplies all good forever. But through insistent asking in Science, human thought is awakened and accepts the good which God supplies. Christian Scientists do not, however, pray thus for anything conceived of selfishly or in a merely human manner as desirable; they would distrust the value of such an endeavor, even if it were successful. They pray, "Thy will be done," because they understand that it is the will and nature of God to supply all that is worth having: health, strength, inspiration, perfect relationships, brightness, joy, dominion, peace, even the infinitude of good. Moreover, they recognize with the reflected authority of God that what He supplies has the right and power to be in evidence, and that all else may be challenged peremptorily, and importunately if need be, and thereby seen as nothing.

Therefore, Christian Scientists do not approach sickness in a timid or tentative manner, nor do they merely plead for the evidences of health. They authoritatively recognize the illegitimacy, the unreality, of disease, and the presence of perfect health as a quality of God. Similarly with want, grief, strife—every evil manifestation. Formidable as it may seem to material sense, they recognize it as a preposterous denial of the nature of God, an impossible contradiction of reality. Thus they scientifically challenge all evil. Vigorously, and yet serenely and confidently, they demand the evidence of the allness of God, good; and in this manner, step by step, they have proof of His allness.

"Insist vehemently on the great fact which covers the whole ground, that God, Spirit, is all, and that there is none beside Him," writes Mary Baker Eddy, the beloved revelator of Christian Science (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 421). "Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good," she further writes (ibid., p. 393). "God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man."

Alfred Pittman

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December 28, 1940

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