Article November 7, 1964 Issue

Don't Let Error Provide an Excuse

STREATFIELD H. COX, JR.

One's progress Spiritward or one's lack of it depends largely on whether one consistently lives up to his highest sense of right thinking and acting or tends to accept excuses for not doing so. True progress and excuses—in other words, self-justification—are completely incompatible.

Clearly no spiritual progress can result from good left undone, from failure to live up to one's highest sense of honesty, purity, and justice, from lackadaisical study of Christian Science, or from infrequent prayer and church attendance, no matter whether one feels he has an excuse for so doing or not. Perhaps it may seem that for every good thing one should do, there exists an excuse for not doing it; but one does not need to be enticed by the carnal mind, which offers such excuses. Progress results only from strict, active obedience to God's law.

"In patient obedience to a patient God," Mrs. Eddy counsels us on page 242 of Science and Health, "let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error,—self-will, self-justification, and self-love,—which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death."

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