Conformity to Law

John B. Willis

All who are interested in nothing the happy adjustment of means to an end cannot fail to be impressed as they look upon an up-to-date printing-press, a Jacquard loom, or any other of the thousand mechanical devices which figure so largely in modern so-called civilization. To observe the ease, the exactness, and the rapidity with which difficult things are done nowadays is simply fascinating, and one follows many of the intricate processes with something of the feeling with which he would watch the masterful performance of a great artist. In both instances there is manifest a marvel of intelligent command which in the one case is identified with a single personality, in the other with all who have contributed to the unfoldment of a complex idea.

It has been a long way from the first use of the wheel, the lever, and the wedge to the present perfection of the many wonder-working inventions which have so largely made the modern manufacturer a mere onlooker, and this gulf has been spanned by that patient coordination of right ideas which, as Christian Science is proving, has no less certainly to do with humanity's spiritual advance. Studious and persistent effort to find and profit by an unvarying and universal order explains all these mechanical achievements, and it also explains, as Mrs. Eddy has outlined on pages 226 and 227 of Science and Health, that triumph of spiritual understanding, that gain of "the prize of the high calling of God," the overcoming of sickness and sin, which is the glory of the Christian Science movement.

For most of us the attainment of eternal life involves a patient trying-out procedure, in which we demonstrate and so finally accept and assimilate real values for ourselves by subjecting the ideas communicated to us to that repeated test which is rightly named scientific. The perception and utilization of divine law, even as inventors have discovered and applied material laws, points the one way to individual and world redemption; and here every genuine good that has been gained in past religious history is conserved and added to, in that going on "unto perfection" which the knowledge of the Christ Science stimulates and makes possible. To realize and profit by the higher potencies of faith in Christian Science is to honor every right and every noble deed of all mankind in all the past,—and what a blessing it would prove if all religionists would but awaken to this fact!

In attributing a perfect expression to the spontaneity of individual greatness, the instinct of true genius, we are likely to forget that such an achievement is but the unimpeded play of the activities of ever-existing law, in the fulfilment of which man, the God-governed man, appears. Thus all the astonishing increase of the facilities for accomplishing things gives inspiring intimations of that inheritance of good which in all its richness and amplitude but measures the capacity of him who has awakened to the spiritual truths of being.

When the machine is perfected, everything is done automatically. The crudeness and the failure of its imperfect antecedents is forgotten; it is now adequate to every demand upon it. And here again it illustrates the larger, the freer, the nobler concept of man which in Christian Science becomes the abiding inspiration of all who hunger and thirst after rightness. The ability to do the right thing the first time, which one has defined as skill, is to be gained only through conscious conformity to spiritual law. It is to have that sense of unfettered freedom which is ever preening its wings "for a skyward flight" (Science and Health, p. 261) and which expressed itself in the glad cry of the psalmist, "I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart."

John B. Willis.

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