The experience of every student of Truth is marked from time to time by periods of illumination, of expanded views and larger comprehension of the heights and depths of meaning included in such statements as St. Paul addressed to the Colossians, Chap. 3:3. Awe at the boundless possibilities, humility at our small demonstration of them, joyful courage at their certainty, and absorbing desire to "prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God" may well occupy our thoughts as we try to take in the full meaning of the words.
But it is not as of possibilities that Paul writes, but as of accomplished facts:— "Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." How false belief and unbelief have obscured the Word until Christian Science revealed and reinforced it!
With the given proof of our relationship to Christ and God, is laid upon us the necessity of walking worthy of it, but the more or less frequent but temporary longing for good, common to mankind is very far from that condition in which desire to have, manifest, and impart good is the ruling motive in life, nothing short of which is being hid with Christ. To the beginner, the requirements of Truth seem a rigid law, but obedience raises them to his view from prohibition to promise, and lie finds that the law of Love bestows a thousand times more than it demands, even though these demands include all that mortal man has, in thought, energy and sense of independent life, that to sin we may be dead. This duty well done brings a sense of "God working in us to will and do," which continually lessens the sense of labor, confers a spiritual quiet, the depths of which malice cannot stir, and shows us how Jesus on the verge of Calvary could say, "My peace I give unto you," for it is the beginning of the resurrection, even the life which is hid with Christ.
