Watching Point 280

280 — WATCH lest you believe that you can live along in a peaceful sense of the reality of good, maintain a high sense of God, and establish this consciousness so that it is permanent, by mild methods. Mrs. Eddy once said, “Jesus spake as one having authority. The mild and pleasant words to a patient will do when it is to quiet fear, but when there is a real clinch with error, to destroy it you must command as one having authority.”

It may be possible by mild methods to find the point where a nail is to be inserted, but it takes a hammer to drive it home. In Science attaining may be peaceful, but maintaining always has the claim of animal magnetism to meet. This error, however, may become our friend, if it rouses us to active and powerful resistance.

Many students have felt that they could have a won­derful time, if nothing stood in their way of retaining a beautiful sense of God as All. Yet Mrs. Eddy once wrote, “The Gospel of Christ was a gospel of glory that never could have been given except through a gospel of suffering.” A prizefighter wins by holding his ground. Likewise students must learn to hold their position against all the subtle effort of false suggestion and argument to make them back down.

Students may look forward to the time when they will have no difficulties, yet we must all be tested under tribulation. Why? Because we cannot claim the ability to make nothing of error, until we can do it under affliction.

In Miscellaneous Writings Mrs. Eddy tells us that we must doff our lavender kid zeal and become real and consecrated warriors. Students who dodge all conflict with the lie, until such conflict is forced upon them, may sometimes trace this reluctance to a fear that in such warfare they may lose God, or their metaphysical thought. Yet one must prove his understanding to be stronger than the lying effort of evil to maintain its claims, before he can claim to be a real Christian Scientist. Students must take what they have learned and demonstrate it with dominion. They must come in contact with the claims of error and come off victorious by proving their ability to maintain their scientific thought in spite of all contrary evidence. Then they can rightly claim that the truth has been nailed home through the hammer of tribulation, so that that which seemed wrathful to human sense, has become an angel entertained unawares.

Mrs. Eddy said, “It is not enough to smile and look pleasant when talking to the devil; speak with authority; stamp your foot if necessary and command it to come out of him, as Jesus did. The smile and pleasantness will be all right when you are out of the flesh, but in the flesh you must strive.”