A MEMBER of the Board of Lectureship was present at a Wednesday evening meeting in one of the churches of Chicago and spoke at some length upon the conversation at the tomb of Lazarus when Martha remarked to Jesus that had he been there her brother would not have died. He said that her thought seems to have been that, if Jesus' human personality had been there the result would have been very different. That is so clear an interpretation that it has led to further thought upon the subject.
Jesus finally met all her thought with those words which have been like a window in the heavens letting down the radiance of Immortality; "I am the resurrection, and the life."
It will be noticed that Jesus spoke of it as a present fact, as a constant reality. Not, I may be; or, Perhaps I shall be some time; or, After death I shall be; but he said, "I am the resurrection and the life." That is, I represent an ever-present, constant reality!
This leads to one great difference between Christian Science and the other thought in the religious world. It affirms present actual facts and conditions and does not merely hope they are true or expect that they will bring good to them. We do not hope that God will be Good, but we assert it as an ever-present fact; that God is All-in-all, and there is none beside Him and there is no power opposed to Him that has a shred of authority over us! We assert that God and His infinite universe contain the abundance of Life and Being, and this is the glorious reality of existence; and the greater the consciousness that we have of this, the more will this abundance come out in our lives.
This is especially applicable in prayer. While there is a place for petition, the expression of desire, yet the great need that mortals have is the consciousness of God and the universe in their fulness; and one means of gaining this is the affirmation of this as the ever-present fact and joy. We do not need to pray the sun to shine on us, all we need to do is to put ourselves into his light as it is radiated into all space. That is the affirmation of the truth. So we do not need to petition God to come to us. He is radiating life, truth, and love into all the universe and what we need is to assert this fact to ourselves so that the consciousness of it shall be clear to us.
We do not need to pray for the air to be about us, we cannot well get away from it, there is a pressure of fifteen pounds to the square inch exerted upon us all the time. All we need to do is to put ourselves into the open space and let it flood us round about. So we do not need to pray God to be present with us, for no figure can adequately express the fulness and constancy of God's presence in the universe. All we need to do is to affirm the fact and assert the reality of it so continuously that it will be an ever-abiding consciousness.
It has been asked why Christian Scientists omit the word "Amen" at the end of the Lord's Prayer. Without assuming to be authority, one sense of it is this: the word "Amen" is a sort of added petition that the prayer just made be answered. "So let it be;" "Let this prayer be answered." But the spiritual sense of this prayer as we have it in the chapter on "Prayer" in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," is that of simple affirmation of the great facts of God and of Being. The great fact which we need to know is that he is "Our Father-Mother God;" He is the "Adorable One;" "Enable us to know,— as in heaven, so on earth,— God is supreme;" "Love leadeth us not into temptation;" "God is now and forever all Life, Truth, and Love." So there is no need of a final petition.
The great sin of material sense is that there is some doubt about God, about His presence, His power, His goodness; about His response to us in need, His care for us; His mercy and His healing. The great work that Christian Science is doing for this age is to reinstate the consciousness that God is the one fact that is greater than all the universe, and we need to dwell absolutely and forever in the glory of this fact. We need to assert that the presence of God is like the presence of space and there is no possible escape from it, and in that is the great hope of mortals. We need always to be conscious that in all causation there is no other possible power than that of infinite Wisdom and Love. We need the constant denial of the error and the most persistent affirmation of God and His infinite abundance, as the ever-present glorious facts of life and being.
The condition of mind that this method brings us into, is very different from that in which we are always petitioning God because of the underlying doubt about gaining any benefit from Him. It is a condition of assurance, confidence, rest, and peace. We know that there is a greater abundance crowding continually about us than we can possibly receive; and the great effort is to gain an everincreasing sense of this fact. Jesus said: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." To know this surely and affirm it against the falsehood of materiality is the work that we are to do. This takes us out of the subjunctive mood, and even the potential mood of belief, and we come into the clear, straightforward assertion of the indicative mood, and always know where we are.
