ONE of the inherent tendencies of the finite mind is to make outlines and plans as a basis for future activities. An outline of what it is going to do tomorrow seems necessary to a knowledge of how to proceed today. This requirement is a result of a limited sense of wisdom, capacity, and resource; it is an outcome of a material sense of cause and effect. The understanding that there must be a first cause, and that in order to be first it must be self-existent, reveals the fact that this cause must be one and infinite, supreme, unchanging, and wholly adequate. It follows that all true activity must be the effect of this cause, and that all determining and outlining power must inhere in the cause, not in the effect. To attempt to determine the outlines of its action would be for effect to become causative, which would be a scientific impossibility.
The understanding that God is the first and only cause is the basis of scientific trust; it brings the assurance that, cause remaining one and unchanging, the activities which are its expression must forever continue. This assurance of the activities of good today being the guaranty for its continuity tomorrow, belongs not to the human mind; it comes only with the understanding of divine Mind. To understand God is to trust Him. In Science and Health (p. 286) Mrs. Eddy says, "The understanding of Truth gives full faith in Truth."
A good deal is said about trusting God, but how many of us know what this really means? Some have endeavored in a blind sort of way to trust God to carry out desires and plans which to their sense seemed right and good, and there has also been a something called trust which is little more than a helpless acquiescence in a higher power. A knowable God is the only basis for intelligent trust and true prayer. The old prayer that asks for an accomplishment of human desires or ends must give place to the scientific prayer of spiritual knowledge. This prayer is the consciousness which knows God because it is the expression of divine wisdom, and which knows that all determining and outlining power belongs to God because it knows itself as the manifestation of the Mind which is God. No human recommendation, desire, or outline can have place or part in this prayer which springs from the consciousness of omniscience and omnipotence.
