Daily Watch for the week of September 11th, – September 18th, 2022
From 500 Watching Points by Gilbert Carpenter
96 — WATCH lest, in your denial of false testimony, you build it up instead of tearing it down. One can say that it is not as serious to have the devil in you, as it is to have God out of you. Hence a higher motive in striving to eliminate error would be to eliminate anything that could claim to shut out the sunshine of God’s love. Before one affirms the allness of God, he should know that nothing can darken man’s thought, or cause him to believe that he is or ever can be shut off from the primitive good that is his birthright.
The dragging anchor of a ship would have to be pulled up before the ship could progress. It is the testimony of matter and its supposed conditions that constitutes the anchor that so holds thought, that it cannot progress into the realm where all problems are solvable. Therefore, the denial of the evidence before the material senses, and the declaration that matter is nothing, are needed in order to convince thought that matter is nothing because it is nothing to consider, nothing to fear, nothing to work with, nothing to try to correct. This enables thought to let go its anchor, to retreat from the body, or effect, in order to work in and with cause.
If a moving picture was blurred because the lens was out of focus, and you saw me striving to correct the error at the screen, you would declare, “There is nothing wrong with the screen, so there is nothing to correct there. Your belief that such is the case is false. The error is in the setting of the lens in the projector, and must be corrected there.” You would deny the belief that there was anything wrong with the screen, in order to make me retreat from the screen and go to the projector, where the correction can readily be made.
When a student cherishes the purpose to harmonize matter, or effect, through Science, it shows that he believes that the process of denying material testimony and calling it nothing, is the way to make it harmonious; whereas the effect of such a mistake is often to make the discord seem more real, and so build it up.
Click here to listen to the unabridged Watching Point:
from Watches, Prayers, and Arguments, as given by Mary Baker Eddy, page 49
“Hear, O Israel, for the Lord, our God, is one God.”
You are not to come in your own name to pray.
You are not to control any mind.
You are to come only in the divine strength, and know that God will rule and does, and that hypnotism and evil minds cannot, and do not, control men or governments.
All power is God, good.
This is my only formula to Christian Scientists for prayer, and God will give you faith that will remove mountains.