Article September 17, 1979 Issue

The spiritual basis of integrity

RICHARD A. NENNEMAN

The way to achieve integrity has been variously described, from the pragmatic wisdom of George Washington in his farewell address that "honesty is always the best policy" to what William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: "To thine own self be true."

But without innate integrity, how can one be truly honest? And without an understanding of one's true selfhood, how can one be true to himself?

Actually, one manifests integrity to the degree he acknowledges his selfhood as God's reflection and understands the God he reflects. In this sense, integrity is identified with spiritual completeness, or wholeness, in which man images all the attributes of God. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, explains that man's real being is the perfect image of his Maker. Using the analogy of a mirror, she writes: "Now compare man before the mirror to his divine Principle, God. Call the mirror divine Science, and call man the reflection. Then note how true, according to Christian Science, is the reflection to its original." ^{ Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 515-516:}

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