STRENGTH AND STRUGGLE

John B, Willis

If one were to ask the average twentieth-century business man how to win success, he might elicit the single word "Hustle." If a professed Christian, he might answer, "By prayer, pluck, and persistence," and the fact that he would thus assign so large a share of the credit to one's exhibition of insistent energy, would be due to the very general acceptance of the teaching that the struggle and tragedy of human life is a natural and inevitable order.

In their every-day life some Christian people emphasize St. Paul's urgency that we rely on "the whole armor of God;" others give prominence to St. James' consideration for good works, but practically all think of their struggles with temptation and sickness as working together for good and therefore as having their place in the educational scheme appointed for their betterment. They think that courage, patience, endurance, etc., are to be acquired in this way; that they pertain to the technique of that fine living which develops the muscle of true manliness; that strength always means struggle.

In a sense all this is true. St. Paul correctly describes the attainment of spiritual good as a wrestling. There seems to be no excellence for most people without great labor, but we do well to remember that this struggle is for the most part imposed by human ignorance and not divine requirement. It is a seemingly severe saying, but quite true, that "only fools have to learn by experience." "A prudent man," saith the proverb, "foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and are punished." In the teaching of Christ Jesus and Christian Science it is made clear that true progress comes through obedience to divine law and not through the experience of hard knocks, and when one compasses this fact he begins to give his attention to this law of intelligence, and is instructed thereby. In Science and Health Mrs. Eddy writes: "Through toil, struggle, and sorrow, what do mortals attain? They give up their belief in perishable life and happiness;" and she further says that "When understanding changes the standpoints of life and intelligence from a material to a spiritual basis, we shall gain the reality of Life, the control of Soul over sense, and we shall perceive Christianity, or Truth, in its divine Principle" (pp. 536, 322), thus strikingly contrasting negative and positive good.

The thought of struggle as not only inescapable but beneficent in itself, tends to make people content with a life of endurance, and this can but deaden one's instinctive responsiveness to that ideal life of spiritual demonstration which means not struggle but triumph. The struggle typified in the wrestling of Jacob is a struggle with an error the claims of which as a power apart from God are as yet conceded, and from which God's good angel delivers us at the Peniel of understanding prayer. If struggle is essential to scientific progress, it is the true way of life; hence the call, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," would seem out of keeping. While recognizing the certainty of struggle in the transitional stages of spiritual aspiration, Christian Science points to the overcoming life as the ideal, the life which brings into illustration "the unlabored motion of the divine energy" (Science and Health, p. 445). It makes clear to human apprehension the vast truth that God is the only doer, and that it is ours simply to prepare "the way of the Lord." It leads to the restfulness of repose in eternal Truth, that of which we can but think as infinitely capable. We are thus saved from the enslavement to self, which is equally disabling whether manifest in a sense of self-sufficiency or a sense of insufficiency.

The sovereign consciousness of Truth expressed in the Master's words, "The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works," speaks definitely for the fact that the human sense of struggle is the index of an aspiring but incomplete spiritual consciousness, and it must disappear in the measure of our realization of the presence and power of Truth.

John B, Willis.

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