All worthy thought of God as divine intelligence attributes purpose and not chance or fate to His activities, and unless He were dualistic, the union of good and evil, His will must be one and wholly good, since the wisdom and immutability of God interdict the thought of any shifting of His purpose. Christ Jesus expressly declared that he came to do his Father's will, and from this we can but conclude that the doing of the Master's work for mankind, the healing of sickness and sin, not only must have been, but must forever be, the will of God, and that men should now attain to that exalted state of freedom, of health, and of spiritual supremacy into which Jesus was ever seeking to bring them.
This assurance of the will of God, as expressed in Christian Science, brings immediate uplift to those who desire to fulfil its behests. They can take their stand with Paul and say, "If God be for us, who can be against us?" They can feel the inspiration of achievement in all the steps by which it is reached, and thus enter into the joy of their Lord, at the very beginning of their ascent. Moreover, a desire to do God's will must pertain to every man who believes in God at all, for to be indifferent to the will of the omnipotent being whom one regards as the source of life and of all good, would mean indifference not only to the noblest human instincts, but to all worthy self-consideration and hope of happiness, and the crass imprudence of such an attitude would argue at once for its abnormality.
It is manifest, however, that to do the will of God one must know what that will is, and the differences, not to say contradictions, of Christian belief respecting this matter, explain much of the strife and contention of Christian history. Thinking of this, one is impressed with the incongruity attaching to the assumption that a supreme authority would exact obedience to its unexpressed and indeterminable will. Such a condition would at once beget a sense of unreasonableness and injustice, and when we remember the insistence and emphasis with which specific and continuous obedience to God is demanded upon well-nigh every page of Scripture, we must conclude that the requirements to which we are to be conformed are definitely knowable. Nevertheless, this thought of the impossibility of knowing God's will obtains very largely even in present-day Christian consciousness, and doubt respeeting duty, the divine requirement, has precipitated a tragic dilemma and hesitation at the crises of unnumbered heroic lives. "O that I might know" is the cry of many a noble heart, and Christian Science renders the spiritually aspiring one of its most valuable services in making it clear to thought that the will of God is intelligible, and in pointing out the way of its determination.
