TO the earnest Christian Scientist, who pauses appalled before the seemingly modern drift of ingratitude, which temporarily ignores some splendid instance of sudden and obvious healing, there should come speedy comfort and renewed patience, —patience because of the willingness of the Master to trust his finished work to his Father's approbation alone, and comfort because the witness is not a pioneer in his discouragement, nor is ingratitude a modern tendency. The Christian Scientist should be swift in remembering enough of his own past experience with the outworn and the unreal, and be slow, therefore, in his judgment of those whose conduct bears a likeness to his own discarded past. In remembering, he will be living his thanks to God in lovingly and tolerantly forbearing with his neighbor, rather than in condemning the unspiritual tendencies of the age, for an "age" may be defined as an instant of peril, as an hour of activity, or as a cycle of stagnation.
Had the compensation which Jesus found in his unparalleled ministry been bounded by human recognition and gratitude, much less by human understanding, it is reasonable to believe that he would have retired with his mother and friends from historic Cana, where our first miraculous record of him is cited, into unrecorded obscurity. In Cana, and in many other localities, by metaphysical means alone, he produced physical effects which neither pagan, profane, infidel, agnostic, nor ritualistic test can ever strike out of the world's recorded history. Yet Jesus never stated that these effects, projected as he proved them to be from a background of divine cause, were associated with or dependent upon society's acceptance, understanding, or tolerance. The effects were produced, not because neither the blind man nor his parents had sinned, "but that the works of God should be made manifest."
Defining obedience, Mrs. Eddy says that it is to be "never absent from your post, never off guard, never ill-humored, never unready to work for God" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 116), thereby impersonally describing those modern followers of Jesus who, like him, wait rather for their Father's approbation than for personal and timely recognition of duty well performed. Never absent from his post or out of season, Jesus, mingling with the Oriental throng on market day, once drew near the ancient infirmary of Bethesda with its five porches, in which "lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water." With what unlabored sureness does the chart of Christian Science discover to the student the location of his individual pool of Bethesda! No longer beyond the Mediterranean, in the lap of the storied East, but in his own separate consciousness, appears Bethesda with its five porches or personal senses, in which indeed lie a great multitude of impotent beliefs, "of blind, halt, withered." waiting for a significant and salutary shock,—"waiting for the moving of the water."
