THE writer of the epistle to the Hebrews assures us that we are the house of Christ, "if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end." Here is truly the test of Christian faith, and here is the real presence of Christ manifest in the daily life of the Christian—if our hope gives not only confidence but rejoicing. Every Christian believer accepts this statement in theory. He believes that if God be with him. nothing can prevail against him; yet earthly experience has often brought to Christians sorrow and disappointment. Christian Science comes to explain not only why this brightness and hope have so often seemed darkened and the free consciousness of Spirit merged in the old mortal sense of things, but also to show how this pure gold of heavenly sense may be kept shining clear within us.
If we have the open vision of Truth, we have rejoicing. If we have sorrow or doubt, we know that we are sinking back into the material sense and away from spirituality. Self-examination shows that it is selfishness in some form which has so reversed the consciousness of light and peace and made us accept sorrow for joy. Now one may ask, "If God gives all good, why have we not the right to wish our individual desires for happiness satisfied? Why is it selfish to wish to be happy?" Nothing is too good for God to bring to pass for His children, but it often happens that accompanying our desire for a thing there is a sense of fear that we shall fail to get it, or that we shall lose it, which gives full proof that we do not have the rightly scientific sense of it. We regard good as a material thing that can be lost. It is in this materiality that the selfishness consists—the desire to possess for ourselves that which is divisible, fleeting, changing, destructible. When we seek that which is eternal, the everlasting joys, then we shall cease to fear, since we shall know that we are never separated from the good gifts of divine Love. When we are fully conscious of God with us, we are conscious of all His bestowals. We do not reach out after good; we know that we are identified with good. The human sense of desire is unscientific—in so far as it assumes that man can be separated from the good that God bestows on him; that God's good purposes can be thwarted. This is to deny the omnipotence of God, to think Him too weak to carry out His own good will, or to accuse Him of cruelty in creating a requirement in man and then refusing to fulfil it.
The scientific process by which humanity may lie here and now put in touch with the bounty of God is truly simple enough. The difficulty is only in winning our own faith and understanding to accept the scientific teaching and to stick to it. We have only to know that man has never been deprived of good, because God is good and is ever present. Working mentally with this basis of Truth, one soon finds that the sense of loss or separation is destroyed, and when it is gone from the thought of the sufferer the selfish, clutching desire is gone too; and presently the demonstration is clear on the outward plane as well; that is, the required good is expressed, perhaps at first in some simple promise of the future abundance; but this the alert and grateful heart recognizes as just as sure of fulfilment as the promises of spring. This is what Jesus meant when he told us to pray believing that we receive.
