IN the familiar hymn which begins, "Prayer is the heart's sincere desire" (Hymnal, p. 91), occurs the line, "He enters heaven with prayer." Like the gospel of Jesus, Christian Science proclaims, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," is "within you." Not through death or through any human experience must we expect to enter heaven, but through true prayer. It is just here that Mrs. Eddy has most abundantly blessed the world by teaching us to pray as Jesus prayed, and thus obtain the same results. On pages 15 and 16 of Science and Health she gives the simplest, most uplifting and practical instructions as to how to pray. These two pages have marked the turning-point in many a career and made all the difference between heaven and hell in the lives of her loyal followers.
All Christians agree that heaven is a state of perfect harmony. No matter is there, no sin, sorrow, disease, or death, but only God and His spiritual ideas. Could any gift be more precious to a weary, sin-sick world than the understanding of how to pray aright, and therefore of how to enter heaven here and now? We often hear it said, "God seems so far away, how can I realize His presence and power?" Heaven and God, and the God-created you and I, are as far away from hate, disease, poverty, sin, and fear, as light is from darkness. The only way, therefore, to cross this bridgeless abyss is to dissociate ourselves entirely from all that is far from God and heaven. St. James says, "Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you." We cannot disconnect the thought of ourselves and of others from evil so long as we believe and affirm evil to be real. The straight and narrow way, Science shows us, is the absolute, which admits of no temporizing.
On page 14 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy says, "Entirely separate from the belief and dream of material living, is the Life divine, revealing spiritual understanding and the consciousness of man's dominion over the whole earth." It is only the evidence of the senses, this "dream of material living" which testifies to evil and which seems to interdict our realization of the kingdom of heaven "within." Let us therefore go aside often, as Jesus did,—shut our eyes, close our ears to all materiality, banish all wrong or fearful thoughts; and as these false claims are silenced one by one, we will enter the gateway to heaven, feel God's nearness, His allness. Then we may begin to know in a measure the substance of Spirit, the freedom of infinity, and to understand how it is that there is no life or substance in matter.
