Article July 20, 1946 Issue

"The divine must overcome the human"

HERSCHEL P. NUNN

How often we hear a remark somewhat to this effect: "I like that chap; he is so human." Do we as Christian Scientists like people because they are "so human" or because they express beautiful, Christlike qualities of character which outshine the human?

What constitutes the common conception of being human? Is it not often an acceptance and a tolerance of human frailties— so-called righteous indignation, flare-ups of anger, displays of stubborn self-assertion, idolatrous personal worship with its attendant jealousies, envies, human loves and hates? Little wonder our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 43), so positively warns us that "the divine must overcome the human at every point." To think of the human as real and God-created is to place an insurmountable object in our path of spiritual growth and progress. Certainly if the human were real, the divine would not have to overcome it.

In our present human sense of existence, transitional qualities of thought such as honesty, compassion, humanity, which may sometimes be thought of as human goodness, are actually evidence of the divine—the divine outshining the mist of mortal thought. However, if we look upon such goodness as the absolute good which is God, we are deceiving ourselves, opening thought to a subtle, mistaken phase of belief which would rob us of clarity of thought by depriving us of the ability to discern and demonstrate the absolute truth of being. That which may be thought of as mere human goodness—these valuable transitional, unselfed qualities—is always derived from the good which is eternal, real, divine, though as yet imperfectly and incompletely expressed in our human experience. There is no real good but that which is spiritual.

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