IF one were to note the things which men think of as having immediately to do with the issues of life, the circumstances, conditions, and possessions to which they look for success and satisfaction, he would find an interesting and reliable basis for human classification. The number of those who pay tribute to the insignificant is surprisingly large, and they give proof thereby that either ignorance or an educated bias has robbed them of a due sense of proportion. No aspect of the human struggle is more astonishing than the pettiness of the things to which men and women are devoted, and these misvaluations upon the part of Christian believers become the more inexplicable when we remember that from beginning to end the Scriptures inculcate the habit of making the thought of God dominant in every choice, plan, and undertaking. The first great commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," is interpreted throughout the Old and New Testaments to mean that every purpose and experience of life is to be related to God, whose expressed will is always to be made the ruling consideration.
This is the burden of all Christ Jesus' teaching. We are ever to remember that God is omnipotent and omnipresent Love, and this is to determine our overcoming, our health, our happiness; in a word, our salvation. To know God and to be absolutely loyal to His law,—this, he declared, is really to have life. The Acts of the Apostles is an inspiring story of the way in which the early disciples conformed to this ideal, and the author of the epistle to the Hebrews has written that time would fail to tell of those who, impelled by this thought of God, "subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens." Indeed the supreme requirement of the gospels, which Christian Science is again declaring in all its saving fulness, may be defined as a call to continuous love-impelled thought-devotion to God.
The distance which Christian people as a whole have drifted from this Christ-ideal is painfully apparent. It is seen in the fact that though the Master and his disciples taught and demonstrated in their works that God alone is the source and supply of life, nevertheless today the thought of looking to God for escape from that which disturbs and imperils the human sense of life is practically foreign to the great body of Christian believers. The healing significance of Moses' declaration to Israel, "He [God] is thy life, and the length of thy days," and of Christ Jesus' wonderful saying, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly," is so far lost to the Christian world that life is now thought of by the great majority as linked to and dependent upon material conditions. In the presence of instances in which the life issue was pending, Jesus said, "Have faith in God." Under kindred circumstances today, his avowed disciples are saying, "Have faith in serum."
