Article February 26, 1944 Issue

The Glory of Overcoming

IRENE V. DUNAWAY

After Jesus had resisted the devil three times in the wilderness, we are told in the fourth chapter of Matthew that "then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him."

What joy Jesus must then have experienced! Human language can hardly describe the exaltation that comes when the peace of God, the divine presence, illumines consciousness after the tempter has fled. But the Christian Scientist who has been willing to relinquish his most cherished human hopes in humble submission to the divine will, who has made the supreme effort of turning away again and again from the devastating testimony of material sense to insist on the facts of true being, until out of the darkness and conflict has come an influx of light—such a one can understand, in some measure, the transcendent experience of Jesus and the hallowed bliss of spiritual overcoming.

However much we may desire an experience such as this, it is not brought about simply by wishing for it. Nor can anyone else give it to us. When the mother of James and John, the sons of Zebedee, asked Jesus to grant that her sons might sit, the one on his right hand, and the other on his left in his kingdom, he told them that such was not in his power to give. And then he gave that definition of true greatness which still sounds a revolutionary note to the materially-minded, "Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister." John, too, saw the need of humility and unselfish service and left us the wonderful promise, "To him that overcometh 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."

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