Article January 18, 2016 Issue

Reject the pull of the past

George Moffett

It is one of the most famous last lines in all of American fiction. Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, it speaks to the seeming pull of mortal thinking that would keep us from getting beyond past mistakes or failures and rising to spiritual heights: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Elegant prose—but still fiction. The fact, as revealed in the teachings of Christian Science, is that error pushes in vain against what Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, describes in her textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, as “the current running heavenward” (p. 106)—the spiritual premises that bear man upward, impel spiritual progress, and counteract the gravitational pull of mortal thinking.

To human sense, man is governed by conflicting impulses: the tendency, on the one hand, toward things spiritual and uplifting, and an equal tendency, on the other, toward things material and debasing—an echo of the axiom in physics that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. 

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