Article May 11, 1940 Issue

Self-Immolation, Not Self-Effacement

MYRTLE R. BIGGINS

Some systems have taught the doctrine of self-effacement, which would blot out or erase individuality and melt identity into a common mold. Since individuality is eternal and unchanging, this teaching of self-effacement tends to develop beliefs which are pernicious, and may cause struggle, disappointment, and much suffering. It was through self-immolation that Mary Baker Eddy received her inspired discovery of Christian Science and wrote its textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," which exposes false teaching and liberates one through the understanding of man's true nature and character.

In "No and Yes" Mrs. Eddy writes (p. 11), "Man has perpetual individuality; and God's laws, and their intelligent and harmonious action, constitute his individuality in the Science of Soul." Therefore individuality can never be effaced or obliterated. The beauty, strength, capacity, and freedom of true individuality are revealed and become more active and understandable humanly through self-immolation. In other words, self-sacrifice means the surrender of the false sense, with all its limiting beliefs, its discordant conditions, its pains, aches, diseases, hatreds, envy, and revenge; the surrender of all those beliefs that engender fear, belief in weariness, poverty, old age, and failure, in exchange for the boundless benefits that come proportionably to one's awakening to true selfhood.

This scientific method of being reborn through self-immolation does not mean a relinquishment of individuality, an effacement of selfhood, whereby one's thought becomes insipid and characterless. "Scientific growth," writes Mrs. Eddy in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 206), "manifests no weakness, no emasculation, no illusive vision, no dreamy absentness, no insubordination to the laws that be, no loss nor lack of what constitutes true manhood."

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