A young student of Christian Science was once heard to remark that he felt he could make better progress if he were surrounded by more favorable conditions. Pondering along this line, these words from our Hymnal (p. 89) came to the thought of the writer: "Make channels for the streams of love." With them came the joyful realization that conditions, however adverse, yield to the power of the applied word of God just as readily as do sickness or sin, if we but make the channels.
If the channels for good are not already present, it is because we have not known how to provide them for Love to fill. Instead of being awake to the fact that under divine guidance it is man who governs conditions, we are still laboring under the illusion that conditions govern man; that we must submit with philosophical resignation to the ills we have not yet learned how to combat. Some individuals, more religiously inclined than others, try to console themselves with the reflection that it is the inscrutable will of Providence that they shall be deprived of good and of the opportunity to express good. How then are we to set to work to "make channels for the streams of love" in order that the desired good may "fill them every one"? The answer is found in the following stanza of the same hymn:—
For we must share, if we would keep
That blessing from above:
Ceasing to give, we cease to have,
Such is the law of love.
