Resolved: That We Use What We Know

A correspondent tells of an increase in the local Christian Science Sunday School attendance so large that it has been difficult to secure the additional chairs needed. A caller from another section reports a substantial increase there in Sunday school enrollment during the past year.

But now and then one hears that a Sunday school is not prospering as it should, or that a Reading Room is not accomplishing all that can be rightfully expected of it, or that attendance at the services of some church is falling off. We Christian Scientists sometimes talk too much and do too little in such circumstances. We have the wherewithal to meet and master such conditions, but too often we do not use what we know of God, His power and law, to dissipate the ignorant forces that would claim to retard, limit, and delay the divine purpose to heal and spiritualize mankind through the God-sanctioned activities of our movement.

When we stop to consider, we know that whatever spiritual progress we have made individually has resulted from overcoming, through understanding prayer, the lies of evil suggestion with the error-destroying ideas of Truth. If confronted with pain, sin, lack, ill will, the alert Christian Scientist immediately turns to the true idea of God, man, law, and substance. By realizing what is spiritually true in regard to man's health, holiness, and substance as God's beloved son, he overcomes the particular lie. But if error argues that there is a wrong condition in the church, we are often slower to array against it the spiritual truths provided of God to annihilate it. If error says it is easier to apply Science to one's personal needs than to the church's collective activity, that is false. There is no phase of error's lie for which omniscient Mind does not provide the answer in the form of potent spiritual ideas, fully understandable by man, for whom and through whom they are expressed. Here is a working example.

The Sunday school of a city church was on the downgrade. Attendance was falling off. Teachers were discouraged. The officers were perplexed. There was much doleful talking, but little constructive thinking. With the desire to remedy the situation, the church board asked the newly appointed and alert superintendent to grapple with the situation. They supported her with a group of wisely chosen officers and teachers. She called these workers together, reminded them of the conditions confronting them, and enlisted their active, daily co-operation to unsee each and every lying claim of error suggested in regard to the God-appointed work of the Sunday school. They went to work fearlessly and expectantly. They continued to work. The Sunday school was their patient, not now and then, but daily.

They brightened up their vision. They recognized the fact that Christian Science is God's own revelation to this age; that the means for declaring and establishing it in the consciousness of the race are defined by Him in the Manual of The Mother Church; that one of the most important of these is the Sunday school. It therefore has the sanction and authority of omnipotence. Its activity is ordered by omniscience. They realized that the all-attractiveness of the only Truth draws, as the polar magnet attracts the compass, every eligible one in the community ready to receive its spiritual education and enlightenment. No opposition really exists to Love and its redemptive purposes. No apathy, prejudice, pride, or self-will can divert from the Father-Mother and His activity His little ones, or hinder the active giving and receiving of Love's provisioning for its own.

The Giver of the revelation forever stands by His gift, and all the agencies of His appointing for explaining it to, and planting its seeds in, the receptive thoughts of men. No failure of successful accomplishment occurs to the One upon whose revelation the Christian Science Sunday School is built. Though temporary arguments of depletion and frustration had appeared, these workers knew they could no more be concurred in, or bowed down to, than the idols of Baal, or the claim of a poorly functioning body. If some workers consented to believe that evil was threatening the accomplishing of God's purpose, expressed in the Sunday school, all the more reason to break the mesmeric spell and prove with fearless, courageous, scientific thought that God is still, as always, at hand; that Christian Science is His revelation; that the Church of Christ, Scientist, and all its activities are raised up by His hand to do His work and "for that he is strong in power; not one faileth."

Was such thinking effective? Emphatically, yes! Within a year's time the Sunday school attendance, which had dropped one half, was back to normal and the enrollment was growing. An atmosphere of joyous accomplishment was notable, not only in the consciousness of the Sunday school workers, but in the church. How was this important change brought about? Simply by a few courageous workers using what they knew of Christian Science. The remedy was there, as near as thought, all the time.

Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 378 ), "By looking a tiger fearlessly in the eye, Sir Charles Napier sent it cowering back into the jungle." Christian Science workers, by looking the ignorant, destructive beliefs that would claim to confront the collective, God-ordered activities of His church, fearlessly in the eye, can send them "cowering back into the jungle" of nothingness. All we need to do is to use what we know, and pray to understand and utilize more of the victory-winning forces of our God. His purpose faileth never.

Of the Christ-idea of Life, which our Sunday schools exist to proclaim, the Master said, "Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Time has not deleted or depleted the enduring vitality of his words, nor lessened in any degree our God-given ability to demonstrate their truthfulness and ever-present power.

Therefore, at the beginning of the New Year, let our united resolution be, "Resolved: That We Use What We Know."