Editorial June 10, 1950 Issue

"THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST"

GEORGE CHANNING

Man is perfect now. Humanity must work up to perfection. The foregoing apparently paradoxical statements, rightly understood, are foundational in the application of Christian Science to human experience. The sense of working up to perfection is illusion. Perfection can appear only to that which is perfect. Nevertheless, mortal sense hypnotically sees itself as contributing to the mentality of a human being, who seems to have to work toward perfection.

Through the influence of the spiritual idea of man's sonship with God, perfect Mind which conceives all creation, mortal sense begins to give way to the presence of perfect Mind and perfect man. This beginning to give way is wholly confined to mortal sense, seeking deliverance from its own mortality. Mortal man, therefore, in his supposititious existence, sees himself as first, and he hopes to become perfect man next, or secondly. In the degree, however, that perfect man appears, mortal man sees his own nothingness and disappears. Thus the perfect man is subject, humanly speaking, to the description of being the last man.

Despite such description, however, the perfect man is the only man ever actually present, and this fact constitutes him both first and last, eternally to be, because he eternally was and eternally is. Graphically the Apostle Paul states this truth (I Cor. 15:45): "The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit." Undoubtedly Paul arrived at that statement as a consequence of his familiarity with the words of Christ Jesus in the parable of the husbandman who claimed the right to recognize for himself the dictates of wisdom regarding proper compensation for his employees (Matt. 20:16), "The last shall be first, and the first last."

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