Editorial November 29, 1941 Issue

Anatomy

Evelyn F. Heywood

According to mortal ruling, the decision as to whether a circumstance or condition is to be accepted as fact or dismissed as fable depends upon whether the human senses testify to its authenticity. But in Christian Science the decision lies not with human evidence, but solely with spiritual discernment. However patiently and thoroughly that which claims to be true humanly, but is not true divinely, may have to be dealt with until it is proved unreal, the Christian Scientist knows that, because it is not of God, it is actually without cause, without law, without substance, and, however boastful its testimony, without power. If he maintains this position steadily and serenely in the face of every lying evidence to the contrary, for him there will be fulfilled the promise which came to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans, as set forth in the third chapter of Revelation. "To him that overcometh," we read, "will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne."

The trouble with the churches that passed in review before the writer of the Apocalypse, was that they failed to exercise discernment between what is true and what false. On page 462 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy writes: "Anatomy, when conceived of spiritually, is mental self-knowledge, and consists in the dissection of thoughts to discover their quality, quantity, and origin. Are thoughts divine or human? That is the important question." The individual is, for the most part, inclined to look anywhere but into his own thought for the answer to the problems which confront him. Yet in his own attitude towards them alone, upon his decision whether he is going to acknowledge the divine as real, the human as unreal, depends the measure of his overcoming; upon his integrity of motive and his obedience to the divine will depends the foundation, true or false, on which he builds.

Is he faced with disease, with sorrow, with discouragement, with a belief in failure, with the seeming imminence of danger or defeat? His remedy is immediately at hand. Mental self-knowledge will reveal to him what he is thinking and will, if directed by Truth, aid him in perceiving what he must accept as true because divine, what reject as untrue because of human origin. And he who recognizes that the one and only decision upon which his health, his happiness, his security depend, lies in this ability and willingness to differentiate between what is divine and what human, abiding by the one, eliminating the other as unable to harm or frighten him, has found the road to overcoming. Mental self-knowledge alone enables the individual to know what he is accepting and what he is rejecting; what is directing his motives and molding his actions. The extreme of mental self-deception is called moral idiocy. but there are many stages leading to it, not necessarily accepted as evil, where, because of lack of self-knowledge, often because of conceit and self-indulgence, men do not face the real issue. They do not discern that their deliverance is to be found within, not without—in that mental self-knowledge which uncovers such evils as pride and fear, human will and ambition, and replaces them with knowing.

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