Two men sat behind me on the bus one evening. We were all returning home from our day's work. They were talking about their hours of employment and their pay. One of them worked in a factory; the other was a plumber. The first told with some satisfaction how his hours of work had recently decreased and his pay check increased. The second then told how he was working an even fewer number of hours and receiving more pay than his friend.

A contrasting viewpoint is given in a letter I recently received, part of which reads: "I enjoy work. Often I am doing several jobs at once, but I don't feel overworked. I really love to work. Every day I say to God, 'Just let me work. That is the joy of life.'"

There may be circumstances where less work and more pay may be entirely just, but too often there is apparent in human thought an eagerness and willingness to do less and less work and get more and more pay. It is a mistake to believe that one is benefiting by demanding much and giving little. This is contrary to honesty and justice, and is an offense against the law of Principle, God.

My dictionary has much to say about the verb "to work." The more common meaning is to carry on one's business. Christ Jesus thought of the real selfhood of man as ever engaged in God's business. Said he (Luke 2:49), "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" He excluded any alternative. Furthermore, he realized that true work is natural both to God and to man. "My Father worketh hitherto," he said, "and I work" (John 5:17). One translator has rendered the Master's statement thus: "My Father works unceasingly, and so do I." True work is then the eternal, never-stopping self-activity of Mind expressed in man.

Untiring work characterizes the All-in-all, and is inevitably manifest where God is manifest, in man, His son. Says Paul (Phil. 2:13), "It is God which worketh in you;" and the Master says (John 5:19), "The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise." Man's work is God's doing.

You may have heard the story of the mortal who was digging a ditch day after day. When he asked himself why he was doing so, he concluded he was digging the ditch to earn money to buy food to feed himself, so that he could go on digging the ditch. Many mortals probably feel like this about their daily work. But a humdrum sense of work or a human aversion for it and being content to do little or nothing are wrong states of material thought, mesmeric, sluggish qualities of carnal-mindedness which deny the ever joyous activity of Life, God.

Mortal mind's sense of work or action is often tiring and unsatisfying. It robs one of the true sense of being. But spiritual sense lifts thought to a higher sense of man, his work and activity, and neutralizes the material and discordant sense of being by revealing the ever-presence of the spiritual and harmonious order of life and action.

God's, Mind's, work is considerable. Not only does it go on eternally, but it fills infinity. It is immense and all-inclusive. Every idea of Mind, every manifestation of Life, expresses without an instant's cessation the action of its cause. The effect has no choice. Loafing is never found in heaven, nor satisfaction in inactivity.

No stress, fatigue, or burden characterizes this true sense of unlabored action. It is the self-activity of all-intelligent Life and Love. As you and I align our sense of being and selfhood with God and His work, our human work will be less toilsome and more harmonious, less monotonous and more satisfying, and God will open the way for us to do that work which we are best fitted to do for Him and His.

Mary Baker Eddy understood the ceaseless activity of true manhood and wrote, "The song of Christian Science is, 'Work—work —work—watch and pray'" (Message to The Mother Church for 1900, p. 2). As we watch not to accept the suggestions of mortal mind that we are, or can ever really be, overworked mortals and pray to realize more clearly the fact that man is spiritual, not material, that he is constituted by and contained in infinite, omniactive Mind, expressing its joyous, intelligent, unlabored action, we shall find a happier, freer thought in our daily work, and make more rapid progress toward a more useful and harmonious sense of existence.

Christ Jesus worked first to become a good carpenter before he worked the works of God that opened a new epoch for mankind. The initiative, energy, intelligence, and love which impelled his work were of deific Mind, his Father and our Father. He was "a workman that needeth not to be ashamed" (II Tim. 2:15). The stupidity of apathy and inaction—so common to mortals—never touched his consciousness. He knew that man's action is never apart from God. He expressed daily and hourly the action that is of and in God. By his God-impelled work he overcame the forces that would have worked his destruction. He demonstrated that man's Life is God, and man's real work the activity of God.

Let us be sure we are willing workers, joyous workers, realizing more and more clearly the rightness and naturalness of work and the wrongness of slothfulness and human ease. Daily let us feel the divine energy of Spirit, Mind, God, activating, motivating, and determining our lives, our thoughts, our motives, and our acts. Our work is to be "abounding in the work of the Lord" (I Cor. 15:58). With the understanding of man's spiritual individuality which the Christ reveals to each of us let us say, "My Father works unceasingly, and so do I."

Paul Stark Seeley