At this season of the year, when our thoughts are by custom turned to the blessings which brighten our lives, it is well worth while to listen to the ringing note of thankfulness to God which sounds from cover to cover of the Scriptures. In the Psalms it rises frequently to an ecstasy of praise and adoration, now ascribing all power and all good to God, now exhorting the people to acknowledgment of His mercy and kindness. Indeed, in Old Testament times the recognition of the duty and importance of giving thanks to God was so definite that certain priests were appointed in the temples whose only function was the unceasing expression of gratitude. When we turn to Revelation, we find that thanksgiving is the very language of the saints in heaven.
What does it all mean? What is back of this overwhelming emotion which so continually found expression in the Psalms? What was the psalmist so thankful about? The world, to mortal sense, was floundering in iniquity, yet he constantly ascribed all power and all goodness to God. In the same breath with which he voiced his gratitude for God's loving and omnipotent control of man, he bewailed the evil which held the world in bondage. There is an apparently fundamental inconsistency between thankfulness for God's loving exercise of unlimited power and a recognition of evil, yet despite the evidence of material sense, the psalmist's heart constantly overflowed with gratitude.
Why this gratitude? The world strove to solve the secret through weary centuries, but in vain, until in this age the solution is read in the words of Mrs. Eddy, on page 333 of Science and Health, where she says: "Throughout all generations both before and after the Christian era, the Christ, as the spiritual idea, —the reflection of God,—has come with some measure of power and grace to all prepared to receive Christ, Truth. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and the prophets caught glorious glimpses of the Messiah, or Christ, which baptized these seers in the divine nature, the essence of Love." On page 483 she writes: "To those natural Christian Scientists, the ancient worthies, and to Christ Jesus, God certainly revealed the spirit of Christian Science, if not the absolute letter." This explains the psalmist's constant rejoicing in the Lord. In his most inspired moments, when he sang his loftiest words of praise, the truth which they expressed endowed him with the understanding that, notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, there are no inconsistencies in the universe of God. Pope wrote better than he knew when he penned the famous couplet,
