What a wonderful word is completeness! It signifies entireness and perfection, fulfillment and satisfaction, without deficiency, lack, or inability. That which is complete is one undivided and indivisible whole, to which nothing can be added, from which nothing can be taken, and which undergoes neither fluctuation nor variation. Completeness can neither be augmented nor be depleted. It neither wanes nor declines. It is as fixed as the Principle which it expresses. Paul wrote to the Corinthians (II Cor. 9:8), "God is able to make all grace, abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work." To always have all sufficiency and abound to every good work is to abide in the conscious certainty of adequacy and success.

Humanity toils and toils to achieve completeness in whatever it undertakes, yet all too often its efforts end in disillusionment and failure. This is because human reason assumes an existence separate from God and from this erroneous premise strives for self-improvement. Christian Science refutes and disproves material sense at every point. It reveals God's allness and all-inclusiveness and the invariable perfection of that which He expresses.

In her book "Retrospection and Introspection," in an article worthy of careful study entitled "The Great Revelation," Mary Baker Eddy draws the sharp distinction between Science and material sense. Here she writes (p. 60), "Science reveals Life as a complete sphere, as eternal, self-existent Mind; material sense defines life as a broken sphere, as organized matter, and mind as something separate from God." Even as the rainbow viewed from the altitude of the clouds is seen as a complete circle, while from the earth it appears as a broken fragment, so Christian Science reveals the unbroken continuity and self-completeness of being.

As God's expression, man undergoes neither birth nor death, and material sense can no more grasp his origin, substance, and continuity than it can define the beginning and end of the rainbow. The conscious completeness of spiritual being defies material definition and human calculation. Life and its faculties undergo no process of change. They do not develop from immaturity to maturity, nor decline from perfection to decay, or from completeness to extinction. No element of being is lacking or limited; no faculty of Mind is incomplete or undeveloped. God is forever expressing His own completeness in man and the universe.

In a paragraph of deep import under the marginal heading "Self-completeness," Mrs. Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 264): "As mortals gain more correct views of God and man, multitudinous objects of creation, which before were invisible, will become visible. When we realize that Life is Spirit, never in nor of matter, this understanding will expand into self-completeness, finding all in God, good, and needing no other consciousness."

These two sentences complement each other and should be pondered together. Here it is clearly indicated that completeness is not a state produced through a process of accretion; rather is it the spontaneous and natural revelation of that which already divinely is. Not human toil, but spiritual understanding brings to light the evidence of completeness. In the illumination of spiritual understanding "the objects of creation" are not forms of matter to be added from the outside to an otherwise incomplete experience, but ever-present ideas of Mind, externalized in Mind and forever expressed. The realization of spiritual completeness destroys the human sense of incompleteness and reveals the perfection of being.

This truth is demonstrable and fills all human need. Christ Jesus proved that sin, disease, death, inharmony, and lack are not grim realities of life to be struggled with and conquered, only to reappear in other forms. He knew that Life is God, Spirit, complete and perfect in its every manifestation, and through his understanding of God he brought this fact to light. Thus the withered hand was instantly restored, the storm stilled, the evidence of death disproved. To his clear perception of reality there existed no broken sphere, no shattered hopes, and in every instance this truth broke the mesmerism of sense.

The spiritual self-completeness revealed by divine Science is no smug human sense of self-sufficiency, nor a dwelling apart in austere isolation. Rather is it the revelation of Love's infinitude, which embraces all in the amplitude of its beneficence. Christian Science is filling the world's great need, revealing a basis of understanding, not through the imperfect amalgamation of clashing ideologies, creeds, and races, but through the revelation and demonstration of one Mind and its one infinite manifestation.

As in our individual experience the understanding that Life is Spirit, and that God, Mind, is the only Ego, expands into self-completeness, the human sense of incompleteness and insufficiency melts into nothingness. No longer is there the frightened sense that we may not retain or correctly interpret the impartation of knowledge or of spiritual illumination which is vouchsafed us, for Mind is understood as One, directly unfolding to us its inspiration and freshness.

Life never loses its vigor or Love its loveliness. The self-imposed delusion of the finite, human self with its lack and limitation yields to the sufficiency of Soul, to the spiritual sense which constitutes our being and reflects the limitless resources of Mind. The infinitude of good cannot be reckoned by human calculation, but it is perceived by human sense in terms of abundance. The reflected completeness of divine Life and Love unites in satisfaction and peace spiritual manhood and womanhood, the strength and tenderness of the divine nature. Says our Leader (Science and Health, p. 577), "In this divinely united spiritual consciousness, there is no impediment to eternal bliss,—to the perfectibility of God's creation."

L. Ivimy Gwalter