Article June 19, 1965 Issue

"Act as possessing"

HUGH MORLEY ADAMS

Many of us who have climbed mountains can recall that the anticipation of standing on the peak has dispelled the discouragement and weariness that have assailed us when the distant objective has seemed unattainable. At these times we have already completed the ascent in our thinking and in imagination look around at the endless view. Without this mental process it would, indeed, not have been possible to begin the ascent. This illustration is not confined to mountaineering. No single act in our lives is possible without the mental view of the accomplishment having first been entertained.

Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health (p. 264), "We must look where we would walk, and we must act as possessing all power from Him in whom we have our being." Christian Science, as its students know, can be demonstrated only on the basis of perfect God, perfect man, and perfect universe. By this is meant that we accept as true the first chapter of Genesis, which says that God created all perfect. Seeing this perfection as a fact, we realize that all that really exists is perfect now. Healing in Christian Science results from an awakening of the individual to some aspect of the present perfection of God's universe. While a doubt exists in the individual's thought regarding the allness of God, good, who maintains man complete and perfect, one cannot prove, as Christ Jesus did, the consequent nothingness of error, expressed as discord, fear, sickness, sin, and death.

To accept the perfect creation as the only present reality and to adjust our lives to this fact is to prove in our experience here and now that harmony alone is real. The consistent holding of thought to what is real enables us to reject as false what is discordant and unreal. This is not a process that can be undertaken as a purely mental exercise unrelated to human conditions. To think in the absolute but to act as if matter were real and the only governing power cannot improve our human conditions. The belief that the circumstances and conditions of mortality are controlling one's experience is the root from which all forms of discord spring.

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