Editorial May 14, 1966 Issue

Don't Be Naïve

Carl J. Welz

Some of us seem to go from one trouble to another. Although we are trying to love our neighbor, our experiences with people are repeatedly disappointing and we wonder why. The cause of this quandary is a kind of metaphysical naivete which translates the perfection of God and man's likeness to Him directly into human terms without taking account of the nature of humanity.

A gardener knows that beautiful roses are natural to his garden and that weeds have no place in it, but he is not shocked every time he sees a weed in his garden. The ideal for humanity was presented to us through Christ Jesus, whose life was immaculate and who expressed in the way that all could understand the spiritual perfection of man in God's image. But Jesus did not tell us that all human beings are perfect. He told his disciples to beware of men. He said, "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves."^{Matt. 10:16;}

Christian Science defines man as the perfect reflection of the divine Principle, Love. But it defines the human being as a mixture of Truth and error, perfection and imperfection. Christian Science redeems individuals by bringing to them the Christ, the true idea of Life and Love. As we come to understand that we are in reality God's ideas, we see that error, imperfection, is illusion, nothingness. Through gaining a better and better understanding of what we are, our ways of thinking and living change for the better, and we become more Christlike, more like the ideal man. Because we understand human consciousness and because we know where we are going, we are not upset when some error appears in our experience. On the contrary, we recognize it as part of the process of destroying error and demonstrating what we really are.

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