The very sunshine of God's mercy, warm, bright, gentle, vital as with the breath of spring, touches with healing the troubled thought of that human consciousness which catches something of the spiritual signification, as interpreted by Christian Science, of the words, "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."
"All things work together for good," said Paul. The promise is adequate, it is complete; but a condition follows, "to them that love God," and the human sense of good is prone to regard a condition as a limitation, a denial of the fulness of promise. So it queries, What, then, of those who do not love God? those so weary and discouraged under the sense that their lot is one of cruel injustice, that they have come at last to hate what they suppose to be God; those bowed down under a sense of their own sins, so oppressed by shame and despair, because evil seems greater in them than does good, that they both fear there is no God and dread withal lest there be a God of merciless vengeance.
Or some, it may be, have become so callous that they seem to have lost utterly the consciousness of good. The seeming power that crushes them, that saps the very hope of hope, that has even led them into sin and bound them in its desire,—all this seeming has dominated every instinct or desire to live better lives; over prayer, perhaps, as they have understood prayer, —supreme and relentless to their toil and pain and sorrow. What hope offers this conditioned promise to such as these in whose hearts there seems to be no spark of love for God to prepare them to fulfil the condition?
