A Discerning student of the Bible soon sees that humility is a quality requisite for serving God and for restoring to mankind health and harmony. It is a quality native to all the great characters of the Bible, such as Abraham, Moses, Joseph, David, and Christ Jesus. Humility was exemplified and emphasized in their lives. Other persons referred to in the Bible had to find it through bitter experience. Naaman was healed of leprosy only when he humbly followed Elisha's instructions to wash seven times in the river Jordan. When Nebuchadnezzar became humble, his sanity and his kingdom, which he had lost, were restored to him.

It was Jesus' humility which gave him the courage and understanding to reject the devilish temptations to use his God-given ability for personal gain and power. The temptations ceased with his declaration (Matt. 4:10), "Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." Through his humble desire to do the will of his Father he overcame the cross and demonstrated the way of eternal life for mankind.

Mary Baker Eddy, speaking of humility, says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 356): "This virtue triumphs over the flesh; it is the genius of Christian Science. One can never go up, until one has gone down in his own esteem. Humility is lens and prism to the understanding of Mind-healing; it must be had to understand our textbook; it is indispensable to personal growth, and points out the chart of its divine Principle and rule of practice." In this passage our Leader makes it plain that humility is essential to the understanding and practice of Christian Science.

The secret of humility is to be found in Jesus' two commandments: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength," and, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Mark 12:30, 31). Humility and love are inseparable.

Christian humility starts with love for God and says (Luke 22: 42), "Not my will, but thine, be done." It exemplifies man's true individuality as the image and likeness of God, divine Love, wherein the image can do nothing but what the original does. Therefore the real man, the Christ-idea, has no will or power to do anything but express the nature and activity of his Maker.

God is Love; therefore His will must be manifested in that which is loving, lovable, lovely, and loved. This fact is substantiated by the essence of Jesus' two commandments already mentioned. Is not obedience to these commandments essentially love in all its varied manifestations?

Humility is necessary to love in the way Jesus taught. Actually, the only way we can love is as God loves, for man reflects Him. God knows man as He created him: intelligent, unselfish, healthy, and wholly good. Then we must so know him. Does it not take humility to so identify our neighbor? Selfishness, superiority, self-importance, may argue against such a course, but they must be silenced in order to shut the door on material sense and its false images and open it wide to the true pictures of spiritual sense. As humility brings a clearer understanding of love, the hard core of materiality—self-will, self-justification, and self-love—begins to dissolve. Then we find it easier to love our neighbor. We begin to see that our neighbor's true individuality has the same origin as our own, for he too is the idea of the divine Principle, Love.

Acknowledging the perfection and completeness of our fellow men in Science is truly an indication of our love for God. All that man is and has is derived from God, by reflection. To God, the only creator and lawmaker, belong the glory, honor, and power which are man's.

Humility makes it possible for us to trust our family, our home, our church, our business, and our pets to God's guidance and care. A false sense of responsibility disappears when we realize that omnipotent and omnipresent Mind intelligently governs, guides, and protects its ideas. God maintains all His creation at the standpoint of completeness and perfection. Acceptance of these facts makes them apparent in our experience and wipes out self-will and its eventual fruits of unhappiness, disappointment, and failure.

God loves all His children equally; therefore humility assigns to no one a second-rate sonship with God because of race or creed, education or family background. The understanding that there is actually no man but God's image removes the Adam belief which would bind one to the claims of mortality, and at the same time this admission helps to set our brother free.

We may seem to be unaware of any lack of humility, but our earnest desire to serve God better, combined with our daily study and practice of Christian Science, will open our eyes to the subtle forms of pride and self-will as soon as we are prepared to see and overcome them.

"Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time" (I Pet. 5:6). Then will you have restored to you the consciousness of your true individuality and heritage as described in the first chapter of Genesis, wherein God made man in His image and likeness, and blessed him, and commanded him (verse 28): "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it."