The Perfect Pattern

F. ADELINE ARMSTRONG

The story is told of a builder's apprentice who was given a rafter and told to make twelve others exactly like it. He laid the pattern rafter on the material and cut one; but instead of cutting all of them by the pattern, he cut the second by the first, and the third by the second, and so on until he had cut the twelve. When the master builder came to use the rafters he found only one that he could use—the first one cut; the others did not fit.

According to a dictionary, one definition of "pattern" is "an ideal, a standard." The reason why eleven of the rafters could not be used was that they deviated from the exact standard of measurement. This may contain a lesson for us as Christian Scientists.

One of the characteristics of the human so-called mind is a tendency to acclaim and follow a standard based on human excellence and achievement. We are hero worshipers. Men who have blazed new trails and reached new heights in any endeavor we hold up to ourselves as models, trying to emulate their actions without sharing in the motives that actuated them. The lives of the men who are earth's pioneers and reformers are, and should be, an inspiration to everyone who is trying to map out a path for himself; but what we are liable to forget is that the reason they achieved eminence was that they followed a true ideal.

Inspired leaders have usually striven to hold before the people an ideal instead of a person as a pattern, each succeeding leader having a higher ideal as the people progressed to the point where they were prepared to accept the new message. Moses, for example, a great leader, led his people far through the wilderness of material sense. His ideal was God as lawgiver; and his standard was obedience, obedience to God's laws according to the pattern showed to him on the mount. In due time one greater than Moses, Jesus of Nazareth, appeared. His ideal was God as Spirit, and his standard was spirituality gained through obedience to spiritual law. Christ Jesus had the true concept of man as the perfect idea or likeness of God.

In our own time, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, and the beloved Leader of our movement, has given to humanity a clear understanding of the perfect man as demonstrated by Christ Jesus. The Christian Science ideal is God as divine Principle, and its standard is spiritual perfection. In the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy says (p. 470), "The standard of perfection was originally God and man." And she adds, "God is the creator of man, and, the divine Principle of man remaining perfect, the divine idea or reflection, man, remains perfect." Here we have the perfect pattern; and if in all we do we adhere to it, our work will be perfected. We can rightly hope to gain ultimate perfection only when our every thought and action is patterned after the divine. If we follow human thought-models, however excellent, we shall find ourselves, as did the apprentice in the illustration given above, with many thoughts that will not fit the perfect model.

Mrs. Eddy says on page 10 of her Message to The Mother Church for 1901: "The victory over self, sin, disease, and death, is won after the pattern of the mount. This is working out our own salvation, for God worketh with us, until there shall be nothing left to perish or to be punished, and we emerge gently into Life everlasting."

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit