OF all the phantoms that worry and weary mankind, perhaps none is more inconsistent with the concept of a just God and a scientific universe than the fear of lack of the necessities of existence. Nevertheless all around us we see men and women struggling to "eke out a livelihood," many of them haunted continually by the thought that want may overwhelm them despite their best efforts; that cherished children may suffer from lack of food, manhood's strength waste from want, and the hoary-haired father or mother sink in sorrow from lack of sustenance. Is it any wonder that our Leader has said, "Mortal man has made a covenant with his eyes to belittle Deity with human conceptions" (Science and Health, p. 255).
Blinded by a false material concept of life, religious teachers have all too frequently encouraged the belief that the "mysteries of an inscrutable providence" permit God's children to experience this form of suffering in order that some good for humanity as a whole may be accomplished, and as a long-time prisoner might grope about in his dark cell after the bars which held him had been unlocked, many are still held captive by this belief, ignorant that an understanding of Christian Science opens the door to the kingdom and frees us from all fetters.
Material thought has always been chained to limitation. More than a century ago the famous English economist, Malthus, proved to his own satisfaction and that of his followers that the ratio of material supply to human needs would diminish so rapidly that in a comparatively brief period want would be general and the means of subsistence difficult to provide. But Malthus, computing from a material standpoint only, could not foresee that as humanity's needs increased Providence would unfold knowledge of new ways to supply those needs, or that, as a result of the application in the field of production of this knowledge, the ratio of supply to demand would not diminish but multiply. What would he say today of his once widely accepted theory if he could behold the markets of the world surfeited with products of soil and shop? He did not know that as human thought approaches the divine Mind it touches the borderland of infinite resources, ideas of that Mind, unlimited and illimitable.
