THE NOBLER DOING

John B. Willis

The world is well supplied with inactives, and for the most part they are inefficients. They make little if any contribution to betterment of the race; indeed they are add to rather than diminish the human handicap. Such people are accounted for not infrequently by poverty, and, as well, by riches. With many the economic struggle seems to consume every increment of their time and strength, so that there is no opportunity to do anything for others; while, on the other hand, the many cares which wealth entails, and the materiality to which it persistently tempts, often result in the centering of all thought upon the furtherance of sadly selfish aims and indulgences. The lack of educational equipment, and that spirit of dependence which is consented to, and cultivated in well-to-do young people nowadays,—these things all tend to augment the number of those, in well-nigh every community, who could be spared without awakening any thought whatever of public loss.

But, whatever the occasion of human impotence, it is certainly true that as a whole the dominating fact in the matter is a sense of incapacity rather than of indisposition. Inefficiency cannot yield self-satisfaction to any one, and though some may seem to pride themselves on the weakness that gives them distinction, the great body of those who for any reason are given to self-depreciation, who are tempted to rank themselves as "back numbers," "nobodies," etc., would be made very happy by the assurance that it is possible for their lives to mean something to the world's advance. This is especially true of that army of aspiring women who, because of their isolation, their physical weakness, their enforced dependence, or their immersion in a ceaseless round of "shut-in" work, seem to be hopelessly separated from that fair chance to be and to do for which they have longed all their lives, and who, consequently, in the wearying years, have acquired the habit of counting themselves out as relatively useless.

To these and to all Christian Science opens a door of practically limitless opportunity in its redisclosure and demonstration of the fact that to know is to achieve; that all true effectiveness through which the radiations of divine Truth are proved to be superior to the so-called human limitations which have heretofore seemed to spell inevitable defeat. In Christian Science it is seen as never before that the doer of the word is he who so abideth in the understanding of Truth that through him God is able to work His good pleasure in the overcoming of sickness and sin; and all this in keeping with the Master's saying, "This is the work of God, that ye believe." Our thought of effectiveness, of success, is thus given an entirely new setting and perspective.

When we really lay hold of the truth that in the last analysis all genuine accomplishment is the dissipation of the darkness of false sense by the appearing of the "Sun of righteousness," the Christ-idea; that our doing for others, for humanity, is always measured by the completeness of Truth's work in us; that all effective service is spiritual, a matter of the reflection of the "light divine" upon human need, and that this work of God in our consciousness relates itself helpfully to the solution of every man's problem, becomes a silent benediction for all with whom we have to do,—then will we begin to rejoice and be glad every day, thanksgiving will have become perennial, and every temptation to self-disparagement and self-excuse will be met and mastered by the recognition that God "is able," as Paul says, "to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us."

John B. Willis.

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"SPIRITUAL SONGS."

November 26, 1910

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