Editorial April 24, 1954 Issue

THE STANDARD OF PERFECTION

Helen Wood Bauman

The standard of perfection which Christ Jesus gave us when he said (Matt. 5:48), "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect," is not an abstract ideal, but a present demonstrable fact. It is the mission of Christian Science to prove the absolute perfection of God and man and to bring it to bear on every activity of human life. And anyone who accepts spiritual perfection as his standard, and who looks to Spirit for the true concept of whatever he is trying to accomplish, is certain to lift his human standards high. He knows that their transformation to higher purposes and forms is his only proof that he has some understanding of the divine perfection he affirms, the truth he loves and reveres.

Mary Baker Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 232), "This age is reaching out towards the perfect Principle of things; is pushing towards perfection in art, invention, and manufacture." And a little later she says: "Human skill but foreshadows what is next to appear as its divine origin. Proportionately as we part with material systems and theories, personal doctrines and dogmas, meekly to ascend the hill of Science, shall we reach the maximum of perfection in all things."

High standards involve intelligence—that primal quality which is not inherent in a human brain, but is derived from divine Mind alone. It is intelligence that determines discrimination and makes for skill and for good taste in everything one is accomplishing. And it is the quality of integrity—also derived from Mind—that impels one not to lower his human standards in order to please popular taste, but to lift that taste, meekly knowing that man recognizes what intelligence produces.

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