Article October 21, 1944 Issue

Unconditional Surrender

HELENOR BOARDMAN

The demand for a permanent and unconditional surrender can proceed only from an understanding of the nature and operation of perfect divine Principle. Jesus understood this Principle and referred to it when he said to his followers, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." Whether it is a nation or an individual, the time comes when each must cease its opposition to Truth and put up the white flag. The giving up of human opposition to Spirit enables the individual to gain something of the vision of the Christ, which alone can give those who obey it their true freedom. Yet often the human mind, because it is human, clings to its unprogressive ideas and methods and is unwilling to learn things rightly. An individual may refrain from unconditional surrender by keeping hidden some secret false god, so that, instead of gaining his longed-for peace of mind, freedom, joy, and healing, he finds before long an idolatrous disobedience which keeps him in bondage. No progress can be made in this way, and discouragement and self-pity forge yet another fetter for such an enslaved state of thought.

A small boy in a boat by the riverbank tried to disembark by holding to the grass on the bank with his hands and at the same time keeping his feet in the boat. The boat inevitably drifted away, and shortly the cry was heard, "Mother, I'm in!" He had clung to both the bank and the boat—a double control and influence, which left him neither on the bank nor in the boat, but in the river.

Now is the time for every individual to choose whom he will serve—God, Spirit, and the purity and beauty of holiness, the freedom and joy of the kingdom of heaven, or the very opposite, the mammon or self-destroying idolatry and bondage of materiality and human limitations, worldly-mindedness, sin, and suffering. In "Miscellaneous Writings," Mrs. Eddy has left no possible doubt as to the steps to be taken and the reward of honest, unconditional surrender. She writes (p. 185) "Self-renunciation of all that constitutes a so-called material man and the acknowledgment and achievement of his spiritual identity as the child of God, is Science that opens the very flood-gates of heaven; whence good flows into every avenue of being, cleansing mortals of all uncleanness, destroying all suffering, and demonstrating the true image and likeness." There can be no duality, no weighing of pros and cons, no waiting to see the result of a partial surrender. Principle neither bargains nor changes, nor does man, for he is God's true and unchanging image and likeness. A wavering sense but expresses the instability of the human mind.

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