THE question of supply touches each individual closely, for however favorably he may seem to be circumstanced there is always something which he believes is still needed to complete his satisfaction. According to the allegorical story of the beginning of the human race, this problem dates from the expulsion of mortals' first parents from Eden, and has continued to be a vital question for all humanity. It has remained unsolved by the majority of mankind because they have looked to matter for its solution, and there is no material solution for it. Moses, Elisha, and others caught marvelous glimpses of a law of supply transcending all material sense, but their works have been regarded as spectacular wonders rather than as normal evidences of a Principle which might be understood and demonstrated. In Christian Science there is unfolded this truth of spiritual being through Moses' discernment of which the Israelites were fed during the wilderness journey, through which Elisha stayed the widow's oil and meal from failing, and through which the Master fed the multitudes without adequate visible means. Though the student or disciple of today is but touching the hem of the garment of Jesus' understanding, he is learning by small degrees that the substance which alone can meet and satisfy human need is not matter but Spirit, and that only through spiritual understanding will the curse be removed which would doom mankind to earn their bread in sorrow and toil.
Probably the first impulse of the student in thinking of this subject is to define it in material terms. The universal belief in the power of money to do things disposes most of us to think lightly of this problem so long as we have a satisfactory balance at the bank, or some other visible means of supply. But the pitiful inability of matter to meet the deeper need, the absolute helplessness of wealth or any other means to procure an antidote for sorrow or ease from pain, to stay the march of time, to bring the lovelight to the eye or gladness to the heart; the utter impotence of human wisdom or knowledge to bring into existence mortals' smallest necessity, to produce a drop of water, a grain of corn, or a ray of sunlight,—all this reveals the unqualified dependence of mankind upon that unseen divine intelligence or force which finite sense cannot grasp, but which underlies and encompasses all true life-phenomena.
It can be seen, then, that the problem of supply is not concerned so much with the things of material sense as with that which this sense cannot comprehend, but without which no one could think or live or love, defined in Christian Science as divine Principle or God, as infinite Life, Truth, Love. Here all human belief of power or achievement gives place to that hunger and thirst after good, that utter abandonment of self described as "a broken and a contrite heart," a state of thought to which the divine storehouse is ever open. "Oh that I knew where I might find him!" expresses the human recognition of its own helplessness, and that its one need is to know God, the knowledge which our Master said is life eternal. Therefore the great essential in grappling with this question is not material planning or thought-taking, but spiritual knowing, or what Jesus called a knowledge of the truth.
