Almost everyone wishes to succeed—to have his efforts result in worthy accomplishment. The true sense of existence, which Christian Science reveals, shows that we are all divinely entitled to succeed, and to succeed now! God never causes or condones failure for anyone. Failure and defeat, like sickness and sin, are misconceptions of life and man, which an understanding of God annihilates.

True success may be gained by an individual with comparatively few people becoming aware of it, for success is first of all the overcoming of evil and false self in individual consciousness through an understanding of man's oneness with the source of all success—God. True success is ours, regardless of race, station, or physical location, in the degree that we discover and demonstrate our individual unity with the Life, Mind, and intelligence that is the source and substance of man's being.

An individual's success is correctly measured not by the variable praises of men, but by the enduring approval of God. Personal influence or material possessions are not a criterion of success. Real success appears only in the degree in which you and I through quiet, persistent mental effort acquaint ourselves with the intelligent cause of our being, the Mind we call God, align our thoughts with this causative Mind, and progressively comprehend and express our status and destiny as an idea of the one Ego.

Mortals in their ignorance of cause and effect, of God and man, believe they can succeed only by personal effort, often aggressive, selfish, and unscrupulous. If for a little they prosper, like the green bay tree, their attainments prove momentary and unenduring. Individual success is proportionate to our demonstration of God, our only real Life. This is accomplished by overcoming with spiritual power, here a little and there a little, the defeatist mental forces of evil suggestion that would deceive, blind, fetter, and bury one in the belief that he is a material personality for whom success is fleeting or unobtainable, but defeat sooner or later inevitable.

The all-present cause of the universe and man is ever actively working through its intelligent forces and its angel legions of right ideas to cause each individual to know what he should know, to do what he should do, to be what he should be, in order successfully to manifest the all-harmonious Life that is God. Success inheres in our God-constituted selfhood. It cannot be gained apart from it. Can one who is ignorant of mathematics succeed in adding a column of numbers? No more can one while ignorant of Life, God, succeed in attaining life's true objective.

What brings success and what results in defeat is thus stated by Mary Baker Eddy: "The predisposing and exciting cause of all defeat and victory under the sun, rests on this scientific basis: that action, in obedience to God, spiritualizes man's motives and methods, and crowns them with success; while disobedience to this divine Principle materializes human modes and consciousness, and defeats them" (Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 267, 268).

Success, then, is the crown placed on individual action that is in obedience to God. Defeat is the fruit of action that disregards the intelligent control of man by God. Success is coincident with right thinking and real living; defeat, the result or wrong thinking and false believing.

Success inheres in God and is derived from Him by man. For infinite intelligence, successful accomplishment is natural, inevitable. What a find it is then to discover that man is God's reflection, and is, in Science, as successful as is God, because God makes man to evidence His own continuing success.

What made Christ Jesus' career the outstanding success of all time was his constant obedience to God, the Father Mind. He knew that the simple recipe for enduring success in humble acceptance and fullhearted concurrence in the scientific fact that man really is the son, or manifestation, of God, and as God's effect is constantly under the intelligent control of causative Mind in his every thought, word, and act. As our Leader puts it (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 136), "He [Jesus] claimed no intelligence, action, nor life separate from God."

Jesus talked to God and heard the inspiring, guiding impartations of the Father to His son and representative. These thoughts were his substance and his Life. They determined his motives and his methods. They empowered him with Mind's omnipotence, with which he demonstrated the impotence of matter to destroy or impair man's faculties, cripple his activity, or end his life. By his consistent obedience to God each moment and hour, the Master succeeded in his mission to demonstrate the Life that is Truth, the Truth that is God.

The Christ-way is the only way to success. If to human sense it at first seems narrow, it broadens as we advance in it. We must disentangle our sense of selfhood from the millstones of false material personality, selfish ambitions, and selfwill by daily study of those treasure houses of spiritual ideas, the Bible and Science and Health. And by prayerful assimilation and utilization of these ideas we must learn the joy of obedience to God, whose unerring wisdom will control our motives and methods and enable us individually to exemplify the success of infinite Mind, divine intelligence, gloriously manifesting itself in man and the universe.

The Psalmist saw that success for man is inseparable from obedience to God when he said: "Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass. And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday" (Ps. 37:5, 6). In the noonday of man's God-given understanding of the oneness of the son with the Father, each one's success is forever secure.

Paul Stark Seeley