Self-Reliance

MRS. GERTRUDE MCCASLIN.

When are we, as students of Christian Science, to be self-reliant, self-supporting, and when are we to lean only on God, the giver of every good and perfect gift? When will teachers cease doing their students' work, husbands carrying their wives' burdens, parents solving all their childrens' problems, and vice versa? Do we not know that in continually doing others' work for them we are depriving them of their brithright, in that the talents they possess are not being used? The Scriptures tell us, "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath."

Do we not paralyze the understanding of Truth by shouldering burdens that should be borne by those who know the truth but do not use it? Paul said: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure."

How are we to be saved from the nightmare of error, if we do not commence by degrees to destroy our belief in it? Often one is apt to be deluded with the idea that he is doing his very best, when the fact is that he is asleep and inactive. In "Miscellaneous Writings," p. 114, Mrs. Eddy says: "Christian Scientists cannot watch too sedulously, or bar their doors too closely, or pray to God too fervently, for deliverance from the claims of evil." In the Message to the Mother Church in 1902, page 29, we read, "Many sleep who should keep themselves awake, and waken the world."

To be self-reliant is to rely on God, to recognize no selfhood apart from Him, to know that in His strength we shall find strength and power.

We sometimes hear this query: Why is it that those who are quite young in Science are asked to solve the problems of those who have known of it so much longer, but have hidden their talent in a napkin? Yes, why do we stand in our own light and then seek perpetually to borrow oil of our brother? Mrs. Eddy says in "Retrospection and Introspection," page 78: "Man shines by borrowed light." But this light is the light of God. The illumination of the individual pathway will not come until we commence to pray understandingly, "'Thy kingdom come;' let the reign of Truth and Love be established in me" (Church Manual, Art. XXI., Sect. 4).

Each right thought and desire in our every-day life is the forerunner of the larger work of which Paul speaks in I Corinthians, 15:26: "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." When the test comes and we stand alone with God, our sole reliance, if faithful we shall have the reward of the righteous.

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