IN one of the mammoth manufacturing plants of the middle West the motive power is supplied by an engine which is a marvel of mechanical skill. So carefully was it planned and built, so delicate are its manifold adjustments, that friction, the bane of all mechanical effort, seems well-nigh eliminated. Speedily, smoothly, and efficiently it fulfils its appointed task, and withal so quietly that to the casual observer the great wheels are apparently motionless. Yet in this clean and quiet room there is being generated the tremendous force without which the busy hum of industry, so evident elsewhere in the building, would at once be silenced.
Almost instantly, as one looks upon this triumph of industrial engineering, he is reminded of what Mrs. Eddy has characterized as "the unlabored motion of the divine energy" (Science and Health, p. 445); that infinite omnipotence which "in the beginning" as we read, "created the heaven and the earth," and whose beneficent work today in the healing of sickness and sin is being accomplished just as quietly and efficiently. Realizing this, and that in this omnipotence every least one of Mind's ideas lives, and moves, and has its being, why should we ever doubt that evil, whose supposed power has darkened human existence through the ages, will have its final overcoming, even as the so-called law of frictional resistance has been so nearly annulled by the artisan's skill.
He who understood "the ordinances of heaven" looked with compassion on the woman whom Satan had held in durance so many years, and the "divine energy" which nineteen centuries ago loosed her bonds is today exercising that same "unlabored motion" when through Christian Science it casts out the devils of envy, jealousy, malice, and hatred,—evils that have tortured their victims mentally and physically almost beyond endurance. To human sense no aid is being given the sufferer, but one by one his ills are dispelled into the nothingness whence they came. So gently has omnipotent Truth been brought to bear, that just how his healing has come about, or when, he may not be able to explain, but again and again the joyous testimony of the erstwhile blind man of Jesus' day rises to his lips: "One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see." He knows for a certainty that Truth does heal the sick, and that, as the apostle James declared, "the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much."
