Editorial January 19, 1957 Issue

OVERCOMING WILL POWER

Helen Wood Bauman

MARY BAKER EDDY makes a profound and important contribution toward the overcoming of evil by her definition of "will" in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 597). Part of this definition is: "The motive-power of error; mortal belief; animal power. The might and wisdom of God." To believe that will is merely a disagreeable human trait which causes its possessor to impose his opinions upon others and to seek to control them is to limit one's ability to deal with error.

Will as "the motive-power of error" is a far more subtle and deeply rooted error than personal aggressiveness. For mortal will power motivates every atom of action in suppositional mortal mind. It is the prime moving factor in false consciousness. It is counterfeit creative power, which produces the mortal concept of man as well as his sins, his diseases, and his death. Mortal will power is the opposite of "the might and wisdom of God" and is consequently unreal. To prove that there is but one will—God's—is the object of Christian Science practice.

The author of a famous address, speaking of ill temper as a vice which even the virtuous are sometimes likely to display, describes temper as "the occasional bubble escaping to the surface which betrays some rottenness underneath." The rottenness underneath is, of course, the undestroyed carnal mind. And so the various forms of personal aggressiveness, which one might call human willfulness, are mental bubbles, false impulses of thought, which betray the more iniquitous and fundamental mortal will power that underlies all of suppositional, material existence.

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