Character

FRANK P. EBERMAN

Given a man's beliefs as to any situation, and his treatment of it is not hard to forecast. His action will be efficient and fruitful as he has the facts, knows their values, and as his purpose is just. His work is abortive and characterless in proportion to any obliquity of view-point, that is, as he lacks understanding; he gains character only as he follows Truth.

The teaching of Christian Science that the truth is to be found only in Spirit and in the spiritual, does not depreciate or belittle the material achievements that chart sixty or more splendid centuries, from the stone axe and war club to a conquest of the natural world, which today commands for men the treasures and pleasures of land and sea and air. Nevertheless, while Adam is no longer a cave-dweller, he is still a grave-dweller; and a world poet, neither pessimist nor iconoclast, in saddened lay has sung the still unstifled lament of Rachel in the well-known lines:—

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

But there lived one—he still lives on—whom the grave could not hold. Calvary's sainted day presented a new fact with which the world has been slow to reckon, and piously modest Thomas Gray, in pointing mankind to an inevitable tomb, but voiced a yet prevailing fear. To this foreboding of human sense Mrs. Eddy brings a great light when on page 426 of Science and Health she says: "When it is learned that disease cannot destroy life, and that mortals are not saved from sin or sickness by death, this understanding will quicken into newness of life. It will master either a desire to die or a dread of the grave, and thus destroy the great fear that besets mortal existence. . . . The human concepts named matter, death, disease, sickness, and sin are all that can be destroyed."

Christian Science does not fail to reckon with this gigantic fact of past human history, and recognizes in Jesus of Nazareth one who had a perfect understanding of the terrible situation he was called upon to meet for humanity. He had said long before, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." These words, urged upon the multitudes in the temple and on the mount, on sea and plain, showed that he understood the Father to be Spirit, and that man, as one with Him, or as the writer of Genesis puts it, made in His image, is necessarily governed by spiritual laws alone, beyond the threat of the cross, the bludgeon, the spear, or the tomb. This was the character of the man of Galilee throughout. "What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" would not have been asked had the questioners guessed that their lives had been preserved from the angry waters by the presence and love of him who knew the power of divine Truth as they too could know who then simply believed.

No candid observer will question the world's sincere pursuit of truth. Ages of toil have led upward from belief to belief. Yet it is written, "I will overturn, overturn, overturn, . . . until he come whose right it is," and "every knee shall bow." "But this last call of wisdom," Mrs. Eddy writes, "cannot come till mortals have already yielded to each lesser call in the growth of Christian character" (Science and Health, p. 291), till the absolute truth about life and its laws is known and practised, till man is perceived and understood as spiritual and not material. It cannot come until matter limitations with their resultant strifes and jealousies are known only as myths; till all good is seen to be the divine heritage of all men; till wars cease; till purity reigns; till the love and constancy and clearness of spiritual vision, which have stamped the life charts of Christian Science with the cross embounden in a crown, shall at last have made the darkened day of Calvary the universal day of God and of our life eternal.

When these signs shall characterize a generation, perchance yet unborn, and men shall understand the storms of Galilee and of life as naught but the "insubstantial pageant" of unreal material sense, it will be fully and finally known that the divine character is Life, Truth, and Love, and that in man, God's offspring, held in His eternal embrace, character means the demonstrably right apprehension of Him whom to know aright is indeed life eternal.

Character is the evidence of intelligent obedience to Truth. It is the priceless possession of each individual, enabling him to bear the cross and to forget the thorns, the spitting, and the spite; to hope serenely on when friends have failed and the harsh voice of slander and condemnation assaults him; to keep pure the love whereby Truth is revealed, and to demonstrate to a needy and it may be jeering world that the works which the Master did, he who loves Truth can still do.

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