THE DESTINY OF MAN

By
Peter V Ross

Disheartening Dogmas
How often are we all impressed with the mystery
of human existence! Whence came we? Whither are we
bound? What is the purpose of it all? These questions
have challenged the wise and simple alike for all times
and races. Out of attempts to solve the riddle and satisfy
mortal unrest, to fathom the future and determine man’s
destiny, have sprung theories and philosophies
innumerable.
The fatalism of the Orient, for example, holds that
all things which can happen to an individual have been
foreordained by fate. By no possibility can a man change
or evade the course of events mapped out for him by this
inscrutable superhuman power. If fate has decided that his
life shall be wretched, or that it shall end in disaster, he is
powerless to avert the pitiless decree. The doctrine of
predestination, once conspicuous in Occidental theology,
is scarcely less merciless than fatalism; for predestination,
after appointing a select few to salvation, leaves the
majority of mankind to drift helplessly into a future
without a ray of hope.
These, and other disheartening dogmas, have not
been accepted without doubt and protest. Inborn in every
individual is a conviction that there exists a power, good
and beneficent, which, at some time and in some way,
will lift the veil of mystery and reveal justice, happiness,
and understanding enthroned where ignorance, lawless-
ness, and suffering had stubbornly contended for
supremacy. Faith has been a tremendous force in
advancing human betterment and enlightenment, but until
faith is itself enlightened and based upon understanding, it
will fall short of bringing in the millennium.
 Faith and Will-Power
While faith steadfastly sustains man’s hope for a
better order of things than has yet appeared, reason
resolutely rebels against any theory which would make
man a victim of chance or caprice, or punish him for
aught but his own misdeeds, or withhold a just reward for
right effort. In so doing reason may, especially if swayed
by human will or encouraged by pride of intellect, insist
that man can himself, unaided from on high, order the
events of his career to advantage. While this attitude of
thought may be a step in advance of such doctrines as
fatalism and predestination, it nevertheless overlooks the
undeniable fact that
There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
And Divinity prescribes and predestinates only
that which is good, without favoritism or discrimination,
for Divinity is good, is just and compassionate.
But the determination of people to control events
by sheer force of will-power, regardless of what may be
the divine purpose, is widely prevalent in these days and
much encouraged by superficial mental philosophy.
Willing a man to be well, to be successful, or to be
happy is not the practice of Christian Science, though it is
sometimes mistakenly supposed to be. The grim
determination of mortals, typified by the fixed jaw and the
clenched hand, to satisfy personal desires and ambitions,
may appear for a time to produce results, but eventually
such methods fail, and the last state of the man who
resorts to them may turn out worse than the first.

Complete Salvation
The Christian Science method, on the other hand,
consists in calmly realizing the indisputable fact that
actually and continually God bestows all needed good on
His people. It is for the individual to know this and to act
accordingly. This process involves a resort to truth instead
of to human will. And truth does not need to be projected
or enforced by iron determination. It needs only to be
 understood, accepted, and utilized.
Thus while will-power strives to force a way out
of the perilous perplexities of human existence, and faith
assures us that a way exists, Christian Science points out
the way and invites humanity to walk therein. It was first
pointed out by Christ Jesus. Thereafter, for long centuries,
it was at most only dimly discernible, until, within the
memory of people still living, it was again made plain by
Mary Baker Eddy through her discovery of Christian
Science.
Many suppose Christian Science to be merely a
health system, a sort of substitute for drugs and other
material remedies. But it is vastly more than this. It offers
a complete salvation — a salvation not only from sickness
but from sorrow, superstition, ignorance, unbelief, and all
the discomforts, difficulties, limitations, and apprehen-
sions which hold mankind in bondage. It awakens men to
a realization that God has planned more generously for
them than their expectations have conceived possible.
Now what is Christian Science that it should merit
these almost extravagant words of commendation? It is
Christianity made plain, understandable, and workable in
present-day affairs. At the time of the promulgation of
Christian Science, the world had largely come to regard
the teachings of Christ Jesus as valuable chiefly for
gaining future salvation. Their present value and utility
were for the most part overlooked. Yet the Metaphysician
of Galilee was not only the most scientific but the most
practical man that history gives any account of.
He not only spoke as one having authority, but he
demonstrated the truth of his wonderful sayings by
releasing people from their diseases and difficulties and
arousing them to a sense of their illimitable possibilities
as the sons and daughters of God. It was revealed to Mrs.
Eddy, after years of patient and consecrated study of the
Scriptures, that Jesus taught and practiced nothing less
than unequivocal Science, valid not only for his time and
his immediate followers but for all people of all times.
She, when this revelation came to her, styled it Christian
 Science, and courageously showed how it could be used
to uplift the intellectual, moral, and health standards of
humanity.

Mental Unfoldment
Christian Science expands the mental powers and
faculties of the person who studies and applies it, because
it acquaints him with the true source and nature of
intelligence. Physiology and psychology associate
intelligence with the brain and would equip every man
with a mind of his own. Christian Science, however,
shows that genuine intelligence is of God, that God is
Mind, the one and only Mind, and that man, as an
expression of God, necessarily possesses divine
intelligence. Brains, then, do not think, nor do other parts
of the body, for they are material and mindless. The
notion that they think or possess intelligence is only an
educated belief, which belittles and befogs mankind. Man
truly thinks only as he utilizes Mind, which, like the
invisible law of gravity, is everywhere present, every-
where functioning, everywhere and always available.
When man commences to grasp this truth that
limitless intelligence is available to and actually
expressed by him, mental vision broadens and clarifies.
He finds his discernment keener, his judgment sounder,
and his capacity for achievement enlarged. When
confronted by difficult problems, or when fearful and
confused, one should remember that he reflects boundless
and ever-present intelligence. Then come the acumen, the
sagacity, the poise necessary to cope with the situation. It
matters not whether he is a statesman at his high post of
duty, a business man faced with intricate affairs, a farmer
on his ranch, a housewife in her home, a mechanic in the
shop, or a school child at his desk. The availability of all-
knowing Mind meets every legitimate demand of him
who intelligently appeals to it.
 Communion with God
Human philosophy may assert that God is
unknowable, that He is beyond the reach and
apprehension of man. Yet the Scriptures, and history
generally, not to mention everyday experience, cite many
instances where man has consciously and coherently
communed with his Maker. God speaks to man through
what is termed inspiration. Whatever is good, noble, and
worth while in the thoughts and lives of men is a direct
impartation from Divinity. No one is barred from this
inspirational communion, for, as Elihu says in his
argument with Job, “There is a spirit in man; and the
inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.”
This companionship with God, in which man feels
the divine impulse and grasps the divine plan, is seen to
be perfectly normal and natural when it is realized that
since God is Mind, His creature, man, is idea, for in no
way does mind express itself except through thoughts or
ideas. God and man, therefore, are intimately associated
and inseparable as cause and effect. And man, as an idea
in Mind, is obviously more than a material form. He is
spiritual or mental — an epitome of the goodness, the
animation, the intelligence which radiate from God as
light and warmth radiate from the sun. We recognize man
as spiritual, quite apart from physique, when we admire
his manner of thought, his character. These mental
qualities, not corporeality, constitute man.
Is it not clear that God is incorporeal and infinite
Mind, Life, Love, Principle? Otherwise how can He be
everywhere present, all-powerful, and all-knowing, as we
all agree that He is? This is but another way of saying that
God is Spirit.
When we concede, as we do, that the Creator is
Spirit, logic immediately insists that creation must be
spiritual. If human sense, on the contrary, sees a material
universe, we have a right to suspect that human sense
entertains a wrong concept of things. This mistaken
concept is all there is to matter, and it is the purpose of
Christian Science to change and correct that concept in
 order, not that things will be destroyed, but seen in their
true light.
To change from a material to a spiritual concept of
the universe does not destroy the universe or anything in
it, but it reveals the universe and all therein as permanent
and beautiful. To exchange the physical idea of man for
the spiritual does not put man out of existence, but brings
into view his real selfhood as perfect and immortal. In all
this transformation, or process of correction, nothing is
destroyed but the erroneous concept of things.
It may be well to note, before leaving this part of
our subject, that scientific intellectual unfoldment does
not cause the individual to become self-centered. Quite
the contrary. Though Jesus attained the very acme of
intellectuality, still his career was marked by tender
solicitude for the welfare of others. Even on the cross,
almost at the last moment, he was mindful of his mother.
Seeing her standing among the sorrowing spectators, he
commended her to John, who also was present, for care
and protection. And from that hour John ‘‘took her unto
his own home.”

Human Planning
Mentally elbowing others aside in order that we
may reach a desired objective, in business or in personal
affairs, is likely to prove detrimental to us and disquieting
to those affected by the unseen jostling. Yet rational
unselfishness does not require us to surrender our all to
others. It contemplates that we shall be just to ourselves
as well as to our neighbor. Certainly Christian Science
does not question our right, or for that matter, our
imperative duty, to entertain large expectations and
wholesome ambitions. It has naught but encouragement
for industrious and intelligent effort. But it insists that in
our planning and outlining we ought to consult God,
which should not be difficult, when He is the all-knowing
Mind so near that “in him we live and move and have our
being.”
He who prepares himself for service, and gets
 ready for whatever opportunity may offer, without too
much concern as to just what the work or the reward will
be, is likely to find his lines falling into pleasant places.
There has been much more of God’s guidance and
direction in the career of every man than he is likely to
appreciate, however headstrong or self-willed he may
have been. Not a person among us, who has reached years
of maturity, but in looking back over the events of his life,
can see that there has been an influence, probably unseen
and unrecognized at the time, but wise and beneficent past
all human wisdom and solicitude, which has urged him
forward on some occasions and held him back on others
— which here has led him by unsought ways and there
has kept him from his own undoing.
As poet Neale puts it:
Year by year, Thy hand hath brought us
On through dangers oft unknown.
When we wandered, Thou hast found us;
When we doubted, sent us light;
Still Thine arm has been around us,
All our paths were in Thy sight.

Ethical Unfoldment
The destiny which Deity determines for man, then,
contemplates for him limitless intellectual and spiritual
unfoldment with corresponding capacity for achievement.
But mental attainments must be balanced by ethical
development, otherwise they may be employed to
promote unworthy aims. Christian Science, therefore, in
awakening latent mental powers, imparts to them the
requisite moral tone. This it does by appraising good and
evil for what they really are. It insists that since God is
good, then all that He creates (and He creates everything)
must be good; hence that evil has at most only a fictitious
existence, which disappears as truth dawns on the
thought. This proposition has not only the support of
sound logic but of Holy Writ, for the first chapter of
Genesis does not close until it declares, “God saw
everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very
 good.”
Thus does Christian Science strike at the very
foundation of evil, by exposing and denouncing it as a
fabrication instead of fearing and dignifying it as an
actuality. If critics argue that this doctrine encourages
sinful practices, on the theory that there is nothing to them
and that they therefore incur no penalty, let it be
remembered that he who knowingly indulges in evil
makes it, to all intents and purposes, real so far as he is
concerned, and is punished accordingly, while he who
scientifically repudiates evil as ephemeral, and refuses to
indulge in the practice of it, is on the sure and only road to
its mastery.
Evil will seem in some degree real to the
individual until he reaches the heights where evil makes
no appeal to him; but he is mightily helped in attaining
that altitude, and eventually will be lifted to it, by
realizing, however imperfectly at the outset of his course,
that evil is actually nonexistent and hence holds no
pleasure or satisfaction for him. Everyone who reads
these lines has, in some measure, proved the unreality of
evil, for its grosser types, at least, no longer find response
in him.

Health Development
It is man’s responsibility to be well, just as it is to
be normal intellectually and ethically. Certainly there is
no virtue in being ill; neither is there any necessity for it.
Sickness and suffering have sometimes been supposed to
be a part of man’s destiny, a divine visitation, having
mysterious functions to perform in accordance with God’s
will. Yet few indeed are they who do not struggle to
escape from disease, even though professing to believe
that Providence has imposed it, while many are coming to
see that God no more visits His people with sickness than
He does with sin.
A God who is perfect fashions all things in
perfection; a creator who is good makes all things good; a
Supreme Being who is Love does not send forth suffering
 and affliction, but joy and peace and happiness. Reason
tells us this is true; inspiration — the “still small voice” of
spiritual consciousness — confirms it; while Christian
Science demonstrates the fact by brushing aside the
illegitimate claims of disease and establishing in their
place a sense of health and harmony.
When we accept disease as real, we combat it with
slight success. But when we face it with the conviction
that Mind never conceived or produced it, and therefore it
is nothing beyond a base belief, we are well on the way to
its final overthrow and extinction.
diDisease, whatever its name or type, is not what it
seems. Both in origin and character it is mental. But how,
you ask, can this be true of those ailments which manifest
themselves upon the body? The explanation is not
difficult when it is remembered that the human body is
the product of the human mind. It is what that mind
believes or makes it. The human mind thinks disease,
pictures it, and fears it as a dreadful reality. The
externalization of disease upon the body follows as a
natural consequence. That which the human mind outlines
in thought it necessarily projects into the body which it
constructs and controls.
How important to the individual, then, that he
empty his mind of sick, abnormal, hateful, and
unwholesome thoughts, and fill it with healthful, normal,
kindly, and wholesome thoughts, because as his thoughts
are so is he. And remember this, that thinking health
amounts to vastly more than contemplating an inanimate,
inarticulate truth; it is putting into operation a vital,
pulsating element, which will never sound retreat until
healing is brought home to him who has sent out the
appeal. For truth, when thought or declared, becomes
dynamic. It goes forth on its corrective mission with
irresistible energy and power, sweeping aside fictitious
beliefs of disease to make room for the facts of health.

Faith in Drugs
But, it may naturally be asked, how is it, if disease is mental, that drugs seem to effect
 cures? The answer is
this. A drug has no virtue or power in itself. The
individual sufferer believes, and humanity generally
believes, that the drug will do something for him, and this
faith and belief, rather than the drug itself, accomplishes
the supposed cure when the drug is administered.
Physicians themselves agree that the less medicine used
the better. In fact drugs are steadily disappearing from
medical practice, because the human faith in them, which
invested them with the only power they ever seemed to
possess, has been shattered. The same fate is overtaking
them in the realm of medicine that already has overtaken
idols in the realm of religion.
It is not so long ago that people purchased
immunity from contagious disease by wrapping red cloth
about the wrist or by hanging a piece of asafetida around
the neck or by wearing a gauze mask over the mouth and
nose. Obviously not the device, but the belief in it,
afforded the fancied protection. Today human nature,
professedly wiser and less unsophisticated than in times
gone by, demands something more studied or mysterious,
and therefore seizes upon vaccines and serums as
preventives. The belief in these things will go out some
day, just as it has departed from the red cloth, the
asafetida, and the flu mask; and when it has, their
supposed effects, whether good or bad, will be no more.
To appeal to a drug or to a serum in order to
change a belief of sickness to a belief of health is at best
an awkward, circuitous method. Materia medica begins to
see this and leans toward affecting the change by
suggestive therapeutics. In that system the drug or serum
is dispensed with, and the sick belief is reached directly
by mental manipulation. The would-be healer, by a
process of suggestion or hypnotism, handles the thought
of his patient, and by force of will-power tries to eject the
sick thought and introduce in its place the well thought,
all the time assuming that sickness is as real as health.
 Prayer or Treatment
Christian Science expels false beliefs by truths,
not by other beliefs or by will-power. It does not
mesmerize the individual who stands in need of help. It
enlightens and liberates him normally and spontaneously
by awakening him to the fact that Life is God and
therefore is above and beyond any manifestation or
suggestion of disease. With his mentality thus illumined,
the erstwhile sufferer relinquishes his thought of pain (and
pain is only a thought, it is not a thing), and he accepts the
facts of harmonious being. Disease thereby loses its place
in consciousness and disappears as naturally as any
erroneous opinion vanishes in the presence of truth.
And what is the truth in relation to health and
disease? Simply this, that health is natural, real, and God-
given, while disease is unnatural, unreal, and unknown to
God and to His man. Disease is nothing beyond a mortal
phenomenon, a false appearance, an illusion. Why is
disease unreal or illusory? Because, being wholly bad, it
could not have been evolved by an all-wise and all-good
Creator. Disease claims to impair and even destroy Life,
when Life is God and therefore eternally perfect and
indestructible.
Now, instead of doubting this wonderful
proposition, as you may be tempted to do, silently declare
it, hold to it in thought, live up to it as far as possible, and
presently you will find yourself demonstrating it as
thousands of others are doing. This declaring the truth,
abiding in it, and putting it into practice is prayer, the
prayer of the righteous man which availeth much in
accordance with the Scriptural promise. It is not the
prayer of blind faith nor of agonized pleading. It is the
prayer of intelligence and understanding, the prayer which
silently insists, and at least in some measure realizes, that
man is perfect even as God is perfect, whatever the
illusions of human sense may say or suppose to the
contrary.
“Prayer,” says Emerson, “is the contemplation of
the facts of life from the highest point of view.” And
 presently he adds, “As soon as the man is at one with

God, he will not beg.” But prayer has too often been
regarded as a petition to move a reluctant God whose
purpose may be wrong and whose course can be changed.
When it is remembered, however, that God is unchanging
Love, and that He confers all that He has upon man, there
is no occasion for pleading, but rather occasion for
knowing, understanding, appreciating, and accepting Him
and His bounty.
The efficacy of prayer consists, then, in changing
man’s attitude toward God, not God’s attitude toward
man. Its function is to lift and illumine consciousness to
the point where man realizes, to some extent at least, that
actually he is at one with God and therefore is in the
possession of all things good and needful, without any
necessity for begging or pleading. This scientific prayer
literally unsees disease, together with the fear and
ignorance which occasion it, and realizes the goodness of
God, the harmony of Life, and the consequent perfection
of man.
Who has not observed that his consciousness is a
veritable battle-ground where wrong thoughts strive to
usurp the legitimate place of right thoughts? Yet one right
thought, resolutely held to, puts to flight a host of wrong
thoughts, as everyone knows from experience. This is so
because right thoughts come from Mind, and hence are
true and invincible. While the only strength or hope of a
wrong thought, whether of fear, hate, or pain, is to
deceive the individual into accepting it as his, instead of
disowning and spurning it as an emanation of evil and
therefore without origin, authority, or power of
persuasion.

Discoverer of Christian Science

It will not be inferred, from what has been said,
that Christian Science practice is purely an intellectual
process devoid of sympathy and compassion, for while
the letter of Science is essential, the spirit is
 indispensable. Stolidity, indifference, and the hard-
as-nails quality of thought have no place in the sick-room.
But tenderness and patience in dealing with those who
appeal for help, accompanied by a clear recognition of the
indwelling presence and power of God, the consequent
absence and nothingness of everything unlike Him, confer
upon the individual ability to speak to disease and evil
with authority.
This lofty sentiment furnishes the key to the life
and work of that great woman, Mary Baker Eddy, who
discovered and founded Christian Science. Nothing less
than selfless devotion to the cause of humanity could have
urged her on and sustained her efforts during the two
score years and more through which she labored
unremittingly to bring scientific Christianity, with its
illimitable possibilities of healing and regeneration,
within the reach of every seeker for help and light.
Ridicule, persecution, and every form of opposition which
obstructs the path and defies the purpose of the pioneer of
truth, she unflinchingly faced and overcame in order that
you and I might come into our birthright of freedom. The
esteem and reverence in which she is held by her
beneficiaries need not, therefore, excite surprise. They
love her because she first loved them.

Eternal Selfhood
Resolved to know how the healings wrought by
Jesus and the early Christians were accomplished, she
searched the Scriptures until she divested the Master’s
teachings and his so-called miracles of their supposed
mystery. She found that Jesus, in healing the sick, raising
the dead, stilling the tempest, and finally ascending into
the unobstructed sphere of spiritual being where
materiality and mortality are unknown, was invoking a
law, which he understood and which others can
understand and apply with like effect.
For Jesus claimed nothing for himself which he
did not claim as the inheritance of every man who would
intelligently abide in his words and deeds. When he
 declared, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do
shall he do also,” Jesus gave assurance that what he did
others can do and what he was others can be. His life was
an example of what our lives must be before the perfect
state of existence called heaven is attained. He differed
from other men in that he had a fuller realization of
eternal selfhood, a clearer discernment of what man is,
and a remarkable capacity for demonstrating the ideal.
Every man is dimly conscious of a better self and a higher
life than he is actually expressing, and every attempt at
right thinking or right living is an attempt to express that
higher self or the genuine man who knows no sin or
suffering or blemish. This real man or true selfhood is the
Christ, and the Christ found complete expression in Jesus
as it will sometime find expression in every individual.
This is man’s destiny, wrought out, it must needs
be, in the interior realm of thought. Thinking precedes all
action, inspires all conduct, shapes all things visible.
Disposition, temperament, character, health — all are
creations or externalizations of thought. A man’s thinking
determines what he is and fashions his future for good or
for ill. Indeed thinking or consciousness is man’s very
existence or being. That is why we say he is mental,
spiritual, incorporeal, measureless, immortal — an
aggregation of right thoughts or ideas, rather than a
physical form with height, weight, and other material
accompaniments. Thinking is constant and continuous.
Not for an instant can one stay its ceaseless flow, but he
can, with divine help, intelligently invoked, control
thinking and thereby direct the course of his destiny
onward and upward until he awakes in the likeness of the
Eternal.