Completeness

Violet Ker Seymer

When belief in lack tempts us we should straightway acknowledge the completeness of the revelation of Christian Science and its demonstrable elucidation of the Master's mission. On page 221 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" Mrs. Eddy writes: "Earth has not known another so great and good as Christ Jesus. Then can we find a better moral philosophy, a more complete, natural, and divine Science of medicine, or a better religion than his?"

A closer study and more constant application of Christian Science will satisfy our desire for integrity. But there can be no complete recognition of man's identity without complete surrender of the personal sense of self. This recognition and surrender occurs gradually in human experience.

Christian Science has exposed the unsatisfying nature and scope of mortal personality, and the fully satisfying nature and scope of man's spiritual identity. Therefore, one who would rise to the consciousness of spiritual completeness must beware of justifying or condoning error in his own thoughts and character, or of postponing its correction. He must not intensify sickness, sin, and lack by gratuitously and continuously voicing them; for this voicing of error certainly impresses it more deeply in mortal thought and makes it more difficult to eradicate.

"Only those men and women gain greatness who gain themselves in a complete subordination of self" (ibid., p. 194). Christian Scientists should invariably deny all errors of corporeal sense. In such scientific denial there is no personal condemnation, no dismay, no fear or anxiety. On the contrary, underlying the denial there is the joyous conviction that the rules of Christian Science can be successfully applied to every human difficulty and temptation.

If the opportunity for victory lies in the direction of a health problem, one should rouse himself to see how natural it is that the abnormal belief termed sickness should be destroyed by Christian Science, the Science of real being. Doubt, hesitancy, faint-heartedness need to be put out and kept out of thought, for Christian Science has revealed the one perfect Mind and divine Love as the endless and impartial source of righteousness, intelligence, and health. The Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, contains every rule that is required to bring out healing in every case. Its completeness grows more and more apparent to every sincere student.

Wherever the character of child or adult appears to need special correction, amplification, or building up, we should turn from this negative appearance to the contemplation of the strength and completeness of divine Mind, its innate freedom from all faultiness or weakness. We should make a study of purposeful, spiritual causation, and utilize it intelligently in the elimination of causeless, purposeless imperfection and suffering. We should claim the identification of spiritual man with divine Mind at every point and at every moment. This is not personal presumption, but is the intelligent and redemptive use of the Christian religion. There need be no discouragement if we will but realize that the divine Mind is incapable of creating a faulty or incomplete individual idea, for He is all-sufficing.

Because good is never absent or inactive, evil never has any actual presence or activity. It has never displaced, replaced, or hindered the activity of man's true identity. Christian Science further reveals that true qualities, such as patience, courage, strength, tenderness, are being expressed by spiritual man without limitation, variation, or cessation. All these qualities are invariable as the divine Love which we must recognize as their inexhaustible source. In the hour of seeming lack, or when tempted to believe in incomplete demonstration in any particular case, all we have to do is to drink more freely of the fount of divine Love, for this will surely purify our thinking and cast out the error that is troubling us. "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters."

The trouble with mortals is an egotistic or else apathetic failure to lean on divine Mind and to take spiritual man as their model. One who has not taken spiritual man as his model has before him no real model whereby to establish his health, his prosperity, and to purify and beautify his character. "Man is God's reflection, needing no cultivation, but ever beautiful and complete" (Science and Health, p. 527). At the very moment, then, when a mortal seems so pitiably unloving, sick, sorrowful, or weak, at that moment spiritual man is consciously expressing the loving-kindness, health, joy, and strength which are the manifestation of the one creator.

In the assiduous demonstration of the unalterable perfection and inseverable unity of God and man lies the means of proving that, as Paul wrote to the Colossians, "ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God."

Violet Ker Seymer

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Overcoming Temptation

October 25, 1930

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