Article March 7, 1953 Issue

WHERE IS YOUR ALLEGIANCE?

JEAN ELSIE SANDERS

Divine Love, being infinitely tender and patient, does not hurry mankind in the demonstration of Life's great truths. All are afforded hourly opportunities to determine where their allegiance lies and what they worship, trust, and obey; and each individual, here or hereafter, must make that decision rightly. Those who have learned even a little of Christian Science begin to perceive that all progress, happiness, and welfare is determined by what one acknowledges as the controlling factors of existence. Then, as each student goes forward in Christian Science, Love requires him to prove more and more often his stand on basic issues of this Science.

A genuine Christian Scientist takes as his guides for instruction the Bible and "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, together with our Leader's other works; and to the best of his ever-increasing understanding and ability he abides by the rules laid down there. As his grasp on Spirit grows, the instances in which his allegiance is tested become more numerous to his view, because he recognizes how much of what the material senses present has to be challenged. Sometimes a Christian Scientist who has stood valiantly and successfully through many trials will seem to fail utterly in mastering some particularly tenacious problem. This was the experience of one student who was perpetually confronted with the problem of lack.

She had been reared in a home where Christian Science was unknown and where there never seemed to be quite enough of anything. From earliest childhood she had heard her parents discuss financial problems freely before the children in an effort to elicit their co-operation and understanding. As she grew to girlhood, lack was so deeply implanted in her thought that it became an accepted part of her daily life. She expected to be always poor, just as she expected to wake up each morning a member of the white race. It was an unalterable condition to her, something that would always have to be reckoned with. When the study of Christian Science was begun during her high school days, however, doors began to open gradually to many better things, but the problem of lack persisted because she still identified herself with it.

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