Editorial December 30, 1944 Issue

Resolutions for the New Year

John Randall Dunn

Where is the individual treading this planet who does not, again and again, hold meetings with himself and pass resolutions? Sometimes he reserves the resolutions for the New Year; again, he may take them from mental shelves and dust them off only after some disastrous bout with an enemy such as temper, or a certain moral letdown. In the wake of keen regret over some untoward happening, how firm is the resolve that never, never shall this error overtake him again!

Take, for example, one victimized by the desire for intoxicants who, after a losing fight and sorrowful aftermath, appears firm in his resolve evermore to avoid detours from the road of rectitude. As Shakespeare says, "How high a pitch his resolution soars!" And yet, upon what sand does one build whose resolution rests not on demonstrable truth! If one believes in the power of liquor to deaden sensibilities, to produce any measure of satisfaction, or to have any physical effect whatsoever on mortals, he is not safe, nor is his resolution unshakable. What would be thought of the child who resolves not to be afraid of ghosts while still believing in their reality?

Now to be Christianly resolute one must have a fixed purpose and undeviating determination founded upon Truth and Principle; and this is the basis which Christian Science gives for a resolution possible of fulfillment and fruition. In dealing with the problem of bondage to liquor, tobacco, drugs, or the like, the brave Discover and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, does not leave her readers in any doubt as to her meaning. Boldly she writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 404): "If a man is an inebriate, a slave to tobacco, or the special servant of any one of the myriad forms of sin, meet and destroy these errors with the truth of being,—by exhibiting to the wrong-doer the suffering which his submission to such habits brings, and by convincing him that there is no real pleasure in false appetites." The starting point, therefore, is "the truth of being"—the understanding that God is perfect Mind, and man His perfect expression, and that the discordant material pictures which appear real and actual to the senses are ephemeral, mistaken concepts. God's man, or he who Mrs. Eddy teaches us is the real man, is a spiritually mental being rather than a capricious denizen in the realm of matter. Because his true selfhood is spiritual, man cannot be touched by any so-called law which claims that he is a dweller in a material sense of body, and that a so-called nervous system is crying out for the drug of liquor or tobacco.

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