Article February 17, 1951 Issue

ARE WE REALLY HUMBLE AT HEART?

KATHLEEN O'CONNOR

Our unselfed Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, evidently attached primary importance to humility, for she states (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 354), "Experience shows that humility is the first step in Christian Science, wherein all is controlled, not by man or laws material, but by wisdom, Truth, and Love." Now it might well be asked, "If one has not yet taken the first step, how can he take the second, or indeed any subsequent steps?" He who would really be humble at heart often finds that much should be cleared away in his thinking in order that pure Mind and its ideas, God and His reflection, man and the universe, may appear.

Although humility is generally despised and rejected by the worldly minded, actually it is so positive and spiritually strong that its practice spells extinction to the so-called carnal mind. To Mrs. Eddy, humility was no weak or negative condition, for she writes of it further (ibid., p. 356), "This virtue triumphs over the flesh; it is the genius of Christian Science."

We learn in Christian Science that the spiritual, or real, universe of God's creating appears to human consciousness only in the proportion that the material, or unreal, disappears. Annihilating the aggressive pretensions of the carnal mind, removing all it has seemed to build up, humility indeed triumphs over the flesh. Because humility is the acknowledgment of the allness of God and His creation and the consequent nothingness of anything beside Him, it builds only on the Rock, Christ. Thus in its true, or spiritual, aspect humility is constructive and positive, is consonant with spiritual reality, or the truth of being.

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