GOD IS PRINCIPLE

Once a Christian Scientist was asked by a friend: "Does it not seem to you a sacrilege to expect the Almighty to act as your physician and heal your trivial aches and ills? Do you not hesitate to ask the Lord, in the midst of His mighty operations, to cure your headache?"

It would be hard to illustrate better the subtle error which has crept into the human concept of God, by comparing the Mind which is infinite with that of finite personality. As human beings attain greatness, they fill their precious limited hours with fewer and greater concerns. The manager leaves trifles to the office boy. The college president has no time to pick up waste paper on the campus. The secretary and the valet become indispensable to the millionaire. The greatest mortals are still finite, and can attend to their preferred interests only at the price of omitting all else. Thus,in thinking of God as person, we have seemed unable to escape drawing some analogy between the Almighty and great human personalities; and however enlarged and glorified our thought of Deity has been,far beyond all the mighty ones of earth, nevertheless our concept has been finite and corporeal, so long as it has been wrought around the type of material personality, apart from Principle.

How completely this changes when we think of God as the very selfhood of love and law,as preserving and restoring harmony because He is what He is; just as the laws of nature,so called,act as they do because of their essential character. The force of gravitation as representing Mind holds suns and worlds in order;why do we not feel anxious to relieve this great force of the petty trouble of drawing a leaf down to earth or settling the grains of sediment in the river? Is light so engrossed with planets that it must exert itself with difficulty to attend to the "lilies of the field"? And shall we think of God as less constant than are these unthinking "forces of nature"?