Where is the individual treading this planet who does not, again and again, hold meetings with himself and pass resolutions? Sometimes he reserves the resolutions for the New Year; again, he may take them from mental shelves and dust them off only after some disastrous bout with an enemy such as temper, or a certain moral letdown. In the wake of keen regret over some untoward happening, how firm is the resolve that never, never shall this error overtake him again!

Take, for example, one victimized by the desire for intoxicants who, after a losing fight and sorrowful aftermath, appears firm in his resolve evermore to avoid detours from the road of rectitude. As Shakespeare says, "How high a pitch his resolution soars!" And yet, upon what sand does one build whose resolution rests not on demonstrable truth! If one believes in the power of liquor to deaden sensibilities, to produce any measure of satisfaction, or to have any physical effect whatsoever on mortals, he is not safe, nor is his resolution unshakable. What would be thought of the child who resolves not to be afraid of ghosts while still believing in their reality?

Now to be Christianly resolute one must have a fixed purpose and undeviating determination founded upon Truth and Principle; and this is the basis which Christian Science gives for a resolution possible of fulfillment and fruition. In dealing with the problem of bondage to liquor, tobacco, drugs, or the like, the brave Discover and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, does not leave her readers in any doubt as to her meaning. Boldly she writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 404): "If a man is an inebriate, a slave to tobacco, or the special servant of any one of the myriad forms of sin, meet and destroy these errors with the truth of being,—by exhibiting to the wrong-doer the suffering which his submission to such habits brings, and by convincing him that there is no real pleasure in false appetites." The starting point, therefore, is "the truth of being"—the understanding that God is perfect Mind, and man His perfect expression, and that the discordant material pictures which appear real and actual to the senses are ephemeral, mistaken concepts. God's man, or he who Mrs. Eddy teaches us is the real man, is a spiritually mental being rather than a capricious denizen in the realm of matter. Because his true selfhood is spiritual, man cannot be touched by any so-called law which claims that he is a dweller in a material sense of body, and that a so-called nervous system is crying out for the drug of liquor or tobacco.

The perfect Mind is certainly not in bondage to appetite of any sort. An infinitely good God can know and include only freedom, completeness, untrammeled satisfaction. Man, God's manifestation, therefore, must bear witness to and express these heavenly qualities. When one begins to glimpse in Christian Science real spiritual being, he recognizes as spurious the claim of the human mind that abiding pleasure or satisfaction can be found in the realm of material sensation. True manhood, the eternal outcome of that "Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning," includes here and now the manifestation of harmonious selfhood, of joyous completeness and heavenly satisfaction. So God's man does not resolve to eschew sensual, earthly subtleties, for he rejoices in present good, harmony, and a peace which passes understanding; and in the ratio that this glorious light is permitted to flood human consciousness, in that degree will false appetite be curbed, pain and sickness be silenced, and dominion be enthroned.

Well may the student of Christian Science resolve, earnestly, persistently, as he faces a new day or a new year, that he will strive to be obedient to Christ Jesus' admonition, "What I say unto you I say unto all, Watch." In this connection it is well to note that the first promise our Leader exacts of her followers is to watch. In the last tenet she writes (ibid., p. 497), "And we solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure."

If one truly stands as a sentinel at the door of consciousness, resolved to admit only the spiritual, harmonious, God-ordained concept of being, and to reject all counterfeit suggestions—in other words, to know the truth which makes free—a happy day or a happy year is a foregone conclusion. Well may those battling under the ensign of scientific Christianity, arming themselves with the sword of the Spirit, and taking the helmet of salvation, resolve at this troublous hour to watch and pray as never before. They need that watchfulness which will speedily halt and nullify subtle or bold whisperings of approaching disease or sin; they need that prayer for the Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus"—prayer that will lift thought to the holy city, that consciousness of the allness of good in which nothing can enter which works abominations or makes a lie.

Thus the Christian Scientist does not make New Year's resolutions to achieve, by sheer will power, this or that advantage. He does resolve, and keeps on resolving, not to be defrauded by the specious arguments of the carnal mind which tell him that he is sinful, sickly, frustrated. He resolves to banish senseless self-condemnation and reach out for the joy and freedom which are his heritage as the son of the King. And, in the words of our Leader, written during her girlhood, and showing the spirituality of her thought even as a child (Poems, p. 33),

John Randall Dunn