Editorial March 4, 1950 Issue

NO APATHY

Helen Wood Bauman

A curious thing is seen in the derivation of the word apathy. While it is presently defined as "indifference to what appeals to feelings or interest," it comes from a Greek word which means not suffering. Paul saw spiritual indifference as a state of sleep and wrote to his friends in Rome (Rom. 13:11), "It is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed." Paul understood the goal of Christian salvation to be the awakening to the glories of spiritual being and wasted no time in apathetic delay.

To wait until forced by suffering to become active in the task of proving God's allness and man's perfection as His spiritual son signifies a failure to understand the nature of the task. Individuals who do comprehend it are typified in the Master's parables of the kingdom of heaven: the merchant who found a costly pearl and sold all he had in order to buy it; or the householder who brought forth treasured things, new and old, from his store. The pearl of great price is Christian Science, the Comforter which the Master promised would guide into all truth.

Through healing sickness and harmonizing human experience in countless ways Christian Science is proving that material personality, with its false pleasures and its suffering, is a mortal illusion and not the truth of man. It is revealing man as the incorporeal, spiritual idea of God, coexistent with Him; as never entering the fleshly body, never suffering in it, never dying out of it. But these are truths not easily won. We must diligently prove them by healing pain and suffering; by dispelling the illusion of a mind that expresses evil; by bringing to light the qualities of spiritual good, which evidence the presence of God's image.

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