THE impersonalization of will has always been a problem in Christianity. To have no will of one's own, and yet not to understand the will of God, leaves one helpless, without direction or security. Perhaps nothing has been so generally misunderstood, perhaps no attribute of divine Mind has been more unjustly accused, than the will of God. There may have been a time when we unjustly charged Him with ordering and sustaining evil,— of willing sickness, poverty, bondage, calamity, and death. To this brood of evils we may have bowed the head in submission and resignedly said, "Thy will be done," thereby giving error full rein, falsely supposing we were co-operating with the divine will. There may have come a time of rebellion, when we refused further co-operation with such a will, blindly perhaps, yet such rebellion brought a greater sense of self-help and security. Then for the first time we unknowingly resisted the devil, the will of evil, not God's will as we may have ignorantly supposed. Then for the first time we rebelled against the evil—devil—whose will had bound us, and had treacherously deceived us by coming in the cloak of Christianity, masked as the will of God.
This masquerading of the will of evil—devil—in the guise of God's will, has been the highest attenuation in Christendom of error's subtlety. The will of God is good and good only, else it were not good-will or God-will. The will of God is impersonal and pure. He is too pure to behold iniquity, much less create or will it. His operation of will is without personal motive, personal retribution, personal condemnation or revenue. He is the eternal good,— God—hence the necessity of our approximating an impersonalization of self, before we can reflect that will which is good.
There may have been a time when we prayed for God's will to become human and co-operate with our wills and desires, only to learn that the human will must become like God's, or God-like; and yet we may not have gone farther than that into the understanding of God's will and of man's relation to it. God's will has for so long been regarded as something overseeing us, rather than as something operating through us; it has been vainly appealed to, as to some remote, unintelligible mystery, intangible as fate itself. Indeed, we may have once regarded fate and God's will as synonymous. It was and we were, but we did not always covet the relationship. What is called fate includes both good and evil, whereas God's will includes only good. In Christian Science we learn to understand the beauty of God's will, to bring it near. We find it to be "Immanuel —God with us," that is, we find His will to be with us—to be with man. "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven."
