Status seeking cannot be said to be a modern trend. Human pride is as old as human thought. Christ Jesus rebuked the status seekers of his day. He said (Luke 20:46), "Beware of the scribes, which desire to walk in long robes, and love greetings in the markets, and the highest seats in the synagogues, and the chief rooms at feasts."

In one of his parables the Master warned against seeking unearned honors, recommending that when one is invited to a feast, he sit down in the lowest room and wait for the host to bid him "go up higher." Jesus ended his lesson with these memorable words (Luke 14:11): "Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted."

Christian Science repeats this great lesson of humility. It rebukes pride and requires that its adherents seek the eternal status of man, made in God's likeness— spiritual, sinless, obedient to the Father, and possessing dominion over all the earth. Scientific Christianity insists that the mortal sense of man is unreal, an imposition of evil, and that it must be made to disappear along with the love of prestige, conceit, self-seeking, and ruthless disparaging of others that distinguish mortals.

Mary Baker Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 476), "Mortals will disappear, and immortals, or the children of God, will appear as the only and eternal verities of man." And a few lines later we read, "Learn this, O mortal, and earnestly seek the spiritual status of man, which is outside of all material selfhood."

Only through humility that regards spiritual values as worthy of pursuit can man's true status be attained. The kind of car one drives, the clothes he wears, the house he lives in, and the fame of those with whom he associates do not define his status in God's sight. Only the measure of his spirituality can determine his genuine importance in the human realm or the extent to which he has been bidden to "go up higher' by the divine host, or Principle of his being—God.

When I was a small child, my parents placed me in a school new to me where I knew no one. The first morning I appeared on the school grounds another small child planted herself firmly before me and demanded, "Do you live in a big house?" I was too terrified to answer at once, having never considered whether our house was big or little; but I soon found my tongue and replied with a faint stir of pride that it was big. This was my first brush with the problem of status, and the pride it stirred in me was not very healthy. I recall the experience only to point out that children need to be taught early that spiritual values give true status and that external values do not.

We find through Science that the true test of our status is the ability to exercise the power that our real manhood embodies. Not human standards but knowledge of man's sonship with God bestows the power to heal. Pride of any kind tends to deprive us of spiritual status, for this snare would have us forget that in Science we are all God's perfect offspring and that He is "no respecter of persons" (Acts 10:34). When we take pride in superficial standards of superiority, we lose the ability to express the spiritual power that marks us as actually the sons of God.

One of the lessons learned from the parable in which the guest is to "sit down in the lowest room" and wait for the host to advance him to a higher place is this: when progress is truly spiritual, there never comes a time of abashment.

Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health (p. 74), "In Christian Science there is never a retrograde step, never a return to positions outgrown." This is a statement we can trust. Progress is accomplished through the action of divine law, and orderly progress cannot be forced.

A Scientist who was without employment during the depression in the nineteen-thirties told a friend that he was ready to do the most menial tasks, even those that would give him a human status very much beneath his capabilities. The friend, who was also a Christian Scientist, pointed out the false nature of the humility he thought he was expressing. She told him that it requires much more humility to express a high degree of intelligence than it does to manifest a meager degree of it and that he should strive for the status of real manhood and the opportunity to prove his unlimited ability as God's man.

The unemployed Christian Scientist saw the scientific point to such reasoning, corrected his false sense of humility, and was soon filling a better and more highly paid position than he had ever held before. He had caught a glimpse of his true status as God's reflection and found himself bidden to "go up higher."

Mrs. Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 227), "The sublime summary of an honest life satisfies the mind craving a higher good, and bathes it in the cool waters of peace on earth; till it grows into the full stature of wisdom, reckoning its own by the amount of happiness it has bestowed upon others."

Here is a status worth seeking, an ideal to work out in actual demonstration of man's perfection in Science.

Helen Wood Bauman