Editorial September 27, 1941 Issue

Buying and Selling

Alfred Pittman

For those who have something to buy or sell, Christian Science affords the same adequate help that it offers to those faced with any other need. Men and women engaged in purchasing and selling in business continually prove that this is so, and it has often been demonstrated by those who are not regularly in such work.

A most clarifying and helpful fact in Science for all who would buy or sell is that neither buyer nor seller can be truly benefited by any transaction which does not benefit both. "Think it 'easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,' " Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 449), "than for you to benefit yourself by injuring others." Christian Science shows clearly that Christ Jesus was giving the same essential, scientific counsel, and not merely advancing a moral precept, when he said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Much resistance has at times been encountered by sellers and buyers through failure to grasp the practical import of this rule. They have believed that it was possible to profit by inadequate service or by taking unjustly from another, and sometimes have feared that they could not profit in any other way. But it is plain in Christian Science that any apparent gains made in such a manner are made at the sacrifice of actual gains which would be far more satisfying. Indeed it has often been found in business and in private transactions that when one turned aside from all endeavor to help himself through meager usefulness or loss to others, and sought instead the arrangements that would most largely advantage others as well as himself, his difficulties were greatly lessened, and he did better for himself.

But if one has something to sell and there seems to be no buyer, or something to buy and there seems to be no source of supply, how is he to proceed in Christian Science? He turns in thought, as the student of this Science soon learns to do in every difficulty, to the facts of spiritual being, to the nature of God, infinite good, and of the universe, including man, as His reflection. He recognizes that by reason of these facts, revealed in Christian Science, it is impossible that anything needful should be lacking for God or man. Supply and demand are never in reality unequal, but rather identical. God assuredly demands the full evidence of His allness and goodness, His intelligence and love, but He also supplies that evidence. Thus the Christian Scientist, working on some problem of supply or demand, may know with full conviction that neither is ever actually inadequate, or removed at all from the other. They are one. It has been shown again and again that the realization of this spiritual truth will remove any sense of inadequate supply or demand. If there is something of value to sell, a buyer will appear. Similarly, whatever supply is needed will appear, even though it has previously seemed nonexistent.

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