Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/228

220 an activity of mind and cannot be a virtue. It has no place in the divine nature and should have none in ours.

Special consideration should be given to Mrs. Eddy's doctrine of desire. Desire that may be resolved into love and again resolved into understanding she, of course, would allow, as Spinoza does. But desire, as the word is properly understood, desire which is a wish or longing for something and requires the lapse of time for its satisfaction, she classifies as a weak and unworthy state of mind, as does Spinoza. Mrs. Eddy co-ordinates desire with “anxiety, ignorance, error” and “fear,” which of course are states of “mortal mind.”

There follows from this explanation of desire a doctrine of self-denial that belongs naturally to Christian Science and Neoplatonism. It is necessarily in both systems. If we do not find it expressed in words it is nevertheless there. And it is a marked and well-defined doctrine of self-denial. It is in short the eradication of and killing of desire. Since desire as such is a wrong state of mind we should not have it. This is not the control but the destruction of desire.

It is evident that this is not the Christian doctrine of self-denial which is that bad desires should be rooted out and good ones implanted,