ONE of the truths learned by our Leader was that "Life, Truth, and Love are all-powerful and everpresent" (Science and Health, p. 108). This truth, proved again and again by the many who have come into the light and blessedness of Christian Science, at once annihilates that false belief of distance so frequently a great hindrance to the attainment of dominion over materiality. It means the "present help" which is both Scriptural and practical. The belief of inconceivable distance between God and man is too often productive of hopeless effort to obey the commands and follow the teachings of Christ Jesus. It is true that God is spoken of as omnipresent, but what evidence, it has been asked, can be adduced in support of this belief? What is there to show that He is near, even to those who claim to be His special children by divine grace? Is the attribute of omnipresence a mere theory, a theological fiction emanating from the human mind and embodied in creeds that were the outcome of a growing materialistic concept of religion?
Many earnest Christians have been landed in "confusion worse confounded" as they have sought to harmonize the fact of God's nearness with the thought, so prevalent even now, of a Supreme Being in the image of man. They were attempting the impossible. That the gods of mortals are merely magnified mortals, indicates, says Mrs. Eddy, "the distance between the theological and ritualistic religion of the ages and the truth preached by Jesus" (Science and Health, p. 141). This truth should have shattered forever those misconceptions about God which are so largely responsible for the woes of humanity. This, indeed, was the beneficent result of Truth's workings, of the operation of spiritual law as known to Jesus, and to his followers for a period after his ascension; but when men departed from the pure spirituality of his teachings, and were unable to demonstrate the divine power in works of healing, there was gradually a reversion to the more limited concept of God, and upon the coming centuries was launched a form of Christianity which had only the faintest conception of a universal divine law of good or of that full-orbed gospel now revived for the salvation of humanity in Christian Science.
Yet there were the simple words of Jesus, as set down in the Gospels, to guide them in the truth. God was always near—was He not "our Father"? He knew every one of His children. He was always ready to hear prayer. "Pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly," said Jesus. The Father "knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him." Why, He was so near. His loving care over all His creation was such, that while the fowls of the air neither sowed nor reaped nor gathered into barns, yet He fed them. And why be so anxious about material things? Are we not told. "Even the very hairs of your head are all numbered"? This is indeed a very present God.
