WHEN one thinks of the amount of unmerited sickness and suffering endured by Christian people in all the centuries, and remembers that the removal of this pitiful human handicap was included in the Master's purpose and plans for the world's redemption, some larger sense is gained of the vastness of the loss to the Christian world involved in the lapse of that spiritual healing which was the distinctive feature of our Lord's earthly ministry, and which Christian Science has again inaugurated. And yet this is but a minor part, surely, of the totality of loss.
According to Jesus' definite statement, his works were a manifestation of his Father's activity. They witnessed to the divine nature and nearness. They enabled men to think of God as a loving presence with whom all have to do, from whose government no one can separate himself, and upon whom each may rely for help in time of need. God was thus recognized and glorified, and so long as these demonstrations were continued the divine must have dominated all religious thought, while today the absence of these satisfying proofs abundantly explains the fact that the world has a very feeble and inadequate sense of the divine presence and availability. For not a few of the scholarly, science has supplanted the thought of God with the thought of material law, and even with unnumbered Christian believers the sense of God has become little more than a theoretical and incongruous concept. This is the greater loss to humanity which was inevitably entailed by that deplorable "neglect" of the "great salvation" from which the author of the epistle to the Hebrews sought to save his readers.
It is a mere truism of Christian experience, both personal and national, that whenever reverence for God as the just and wise ruler of the universe, the judge of all men, is lost, moral degradation is made manifest in indifference to law and colossal self-assertion, and the extreme of this drift is surely reached when men frankly declare that they have no use for God, no sense of need that the thought of self does not satisfy: who have come to regard human "reason" or "ideal humanity" as the supreme object of veneration and a sufficient stimulus to ethical and altruistic endeavor. Said one recently, "Men must be their own gods, each his own. As long as we look to somewhat other than ourselves to set our house in order and make the world a home, so long shall we be infants 'crying in in the night.' "
