Watching Point 179

179 — WATCH lest you yield to the error mentioned in Joel 3:5, and carry into the temple God’s goodly pleasant things. Even though our pleasant things represent the harmony resulting from demonstration, they must not be carried into the church, since the church represents spiritual effort and activity, where the watchword is from Joel 3:9, “Prepare war.” The goodly things represent the fruitage of demonstration, whereas the church represents a warfare with material sense that must continue, until the warfare is ended. Thus the thought of completion should not enter into the church, since it stands for spiritual growth.

The danger from results is that they may bring selfsatisfaction, which is death to progress. No child beyond the kindergarten stage is allowed to play in the schoolroom. That is the place for study. Thus our church is the place for demonstration.

If one really wants continuous progress, he would never desire nor seek to have any error removed without demonstration. Otherwise he is not making a suitable preparation for meeting the next problem. To have a right spiritual objective means to understand that progress is overcoming rightly each error that confronts one in his path, thus giving proof of faithfulness.

To sidestep an error means to step out of the struggle for the time being. Once a student of Mrs. Eddy’s declared that in his early days in Science when he had a difficulty, he went so far as to pray that it would not go away except through demonstration. To him demonstration was such a sacred and vital thing, that he did not want to miss a single opportunity to use it.

The church is not a place for students to go to sleep in the fatuous notion that their work is over, because of the goodly pleasant things demonstration has brought. On the contrary, it is a place where students need to be continually roused to spiritual activity.

A prize fighter employs sparring partners for the sole purpose of calling forth his greatest skill each day, in preparation for the big fight. But there is no stoppingpoint in such training. The church is a training ground for spiritual prize fighters; therefore, it must constantly present students with problems which call for the highest degree of spiritual skill and effort. A progressive attitude welcomes everything that presents the necessity for using the highest sense of demonstration one has acquired.

A preparation for a big fight consists of winning small fights. Jesus continually stirred up opposition against himself, as if he were hiring sparring partners to bring out in himself the daily preparation needed for the final demonstration over death. The Bible records that in preparation for overcoming Goliath, David met the lion and the bear. A notation found in Mrs. Eddy’s Bible reads as follows: “Whenever animal magnetism encroached on his consciousness David pursued the error and ascertained the cause (in belief), recovered lost ground. This advanced him to such a condition of mind that, instead of having to meet each insignificant claim of evil, he saw it as one, although still a giant.”

It is well to remember that the chemicalization of mortal mind is error in the process of ripening for its destruction. Then one will not become discouraged because he is not permitted to rest in his journey, or to take God’s goodly pleasant things into the temple.