How many of us, taught in childhood to repeat the Lord's Prayer, ever recognized the deep divinity involved in the above portion of it before we were awakened to the glorious light shed upon the Scriptures and the life of Christ Jesus by Christian Science? In the visible universe, as it appears in human consciousness, is it man alone who fails to do the will of God and to reflect His law?
That seems to be the implied belief in the old religious thought, for in the narrower sense of sin as commonly held in that thought, man alone is a sinner. But what does this involve? In the first place, it involves the impossible proposition that God has two wills or laws, one for Heaven and another for earth, for no Christian will contend that the conditions which exist in the physical world and the law which governs its phenomena are operative in the Heaven to which he looks forward. In the second place, it makes God responsible for all the suffering, misery, cruelty, and disasters which we see manifested throughout the physical world, and we cannot escape from this conclusion by saying that matter has its own laws, for this would be admitting that there is a power greater than God's power. We should be practically leaving God out of His own universe and falling into absolute materialism. Are we to understand, then, that Jesus' petition refers only to the doing of God's will by man, in earth as he does in Heaven, and that otherwise His will or law is being accomplished on earth? Even if we leave man out of the question, we are forced to admit, if this be true, that God's law of progress in this world is a life and death struggle for supremacy with the survival of the physically fittest. Can this be the law of a loving God such as Jesus revealed to mankind? If it is, we must concede that man, while on the earth, is also subject to this law and is likewise the helpless victim of chance and circumstance, of famine, pestilence, accident, and every kind of disaster which comes through the so-called laws of nature.
But is not all this the old Adam dream that came through the knowledge of both good and evil—the result of a false sense of being or existence apart from God, and a misconception, through the false testimony of a physical sense, of the realities of God's spiritual universe, which is His true kingdom governed by the perpetual, unchangeable law of harmony and love? If the testimony of the physical senses be true, why does not the study of matter and physical phenomena lead to a knowledge of reality?
It is generally admitted by the great philosophers of the physical school that human knowledge is only relative, and that an impenetrable wall circumscribes all sense perception and shuts out a knowledge of reality. In regard to the ultimate nature of things, or reality, in regard to a first great cause and the destiny of the individual man, physical science can only answer: "I do not know." "And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee; and he saith, I cannot: for it is sealed." So we see that after many centuries of investigation the students of physical phenomena have reached a point where many are ready to admit the unreality of the material universe, as it appears in human consciousness; and this is but the negative part of the philosophy taught and demonstrated by Jesus and his followers nineteen hundred years ago. Of the great positive philosophy of God and His spiritual kingdom there is hardly a suggestion.
This could only come through revelation; but when once revealed, as it is in the Scriptures, and demonstrated, as it was by Jesus, and now again explained in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" it is found to be something tangible in human experience. We find this view of the unreal or temporal character of the material world and its laws is strongly supported by the doctrine of Jesus and his early followers. Paul, in particular, seems to have taken great care that this distinction between the temporal and eternal, or the real and the unreal, should be understood, as in the following: "While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal: but the things which are not seen are eternal" (2 Corinthians, 4:18). And again: "Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. . . . But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (I Corinthians, 2:12, 14).
All of this but leads to the conclusion that God's eternal kingdom and His unchangeable law of love are not made manifest in physical phenomena or material law, and we find that this idea gives a wider and deeper significance to the prayer: "Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in Heaven." According to Paul, "We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now."
It is a whole world sunk in sin, the result of a false sense of life and power in matter; and the consciousness of mortal man but reflects this false, temporal, or unreal state or condition, just as the spiritual man, made in the likeness and image of the one perfect and eternal Mind, reflects in consciousness the real spiritual universe, in which God's law of love makes a condition of harmony called Heaven. So it was that Jesus taught us to pray to "our Father which art in Heaven"—whose Kingdom is in Heaven and not in the material sense of things, else why pray for it to come, and for His will to be accomplished in earth? Jesus said: "Now shall the prince of this world be cast out:" and again: "The prince of this world Cometh, and hath nothing in me." What a stinging rebuke was that administered by Jesus to mortal mind, or this human sense of life and power in matter, which could not discern the spiritual truths He was teaching: "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do: he was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."
Christian Science has also given to some of us a higher significance in the sense of personal submission to God in the use of the beautiful words: "Thy will be done." By one who believes that God rules the world and mankind through special providence and by direct interference in the affairs of the individual human being, this is often used in a sense that really implies submission to the "prince of this world" and the "power of darkness" rather than to the will or law of the one good and loving God. For instance, how often are prayers for the recovery of the sick prefaced by the condition "if it be Thy will," although the Scriptures most emphatically declare that God takes no pleasure in the death of man, and that Jesus came to "destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil." What is this devil but a false sense of life in matter? These who are trying to live the life of a true Christian Scientist do not passively repeat, "Thy will be done," but they earnestly strive to do His will according to their highest understanding of what Jesus taught was the will of our Father in Heaven. God's will is His good pleasure, but His pleasure is also His law, and that law must be eternal and invariable, else there is no stability, and the Scriptures tell us that with Him is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. In this struggle to bring the material senses and the human will into subjection to God's will, there is almost constant occasion to humble the egotistical sense of personality and to practise, in our poor way and in all humility, the beautiful submission which the Great Exemplar manifested in all his thoughts and acts leading up to his final triumphant struggle in Gethsemane.
We read in Colossians, 3:9, 10: "Lie not to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him," and again in 2 Corinthians, 4:16: "For which cause we faint not: but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day."
Bearing in mind many such admonitions, Christian Scientists, when they pray that God's will be done, try to realize in thought and act that His will is being accomplished in them in so far as they eliminate from human consciousness the material sense of things, the sense of evil, and gain a truer sense of spiritual life and goodness. They strive to realize in act as well as thought that man's true destiny, as the image and likeness of an ever-present, all-powerful, and loving God, is the perfect reflection of divine Mind, and that man attains Heaven and his rightful heritage as "joint heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him."
That is, we must suffer with him in conquering self and overcoming this false sense of things, these material symbols and the feast of material sense, which must give place to a higher conception of the allness of God and His spiritual kingdom, ruled by the perfect law of harmony and love.
