There may be some who believe that if Paul were living in this year of our Lord, 1918, he would not write with such confidence about our "always having all sufficiency in all things." From a human sense of things there appears to be not only a decided insufficiency of the ordinary comforts and conveniences of life, owing to the strange situation in which the world finds itself, but many of the things which have heretofore been regarded as actual necessities seem to be approaching perilously near the vanishing point. Yet if Paul were on earth to-day we have small reason to believe, from what we know of this intrepid Christian warrior, that he would have modified his statement in the slightest degree; for he who wrote that wonderful letter to the church at Corinth had already proved, by enduring shipwreck, imprisonment, beating, stoning, hunger, thirst, cold, and nakedness, that the sufficiency to which he referred, and which had sustained him through it all, was that spiritual abundance of right ideas which constitutes man's true being.
The trouble is that to-day, as in Paul's time, a world asleep to spiritual reality persists in miscalling man a material being, with material needs which matter alone can supply. From this false premise it of course logically follows that when material things give out, man's supply gives out; and that is exactly what is being believed in the world to-day. So much is heard about it on every side that even those who are students of Christian Science may sometimes be influenced by this surcharged mental atmosphere to accept this false conclusion, and suffer the sharp consequences. Man is purely spiritual, and as a natural consequence, he lives by and because of Spirit, not by and because of matter.
But how, some one may ask, does one make this teaching practical and applicable to our present problem? If one's supply of coal, for instance, is running low, does the understanding of man's true identity as a child of God put a supply of coal in his cellar? It assuredly can, and frequently does, through the operation of the same law which Jesus understood and utilized two thousand years ago. It happened on that occasion to be food which gave out, instead of fuel; but it was the same old argument, a belief of insufficiency. Material sense saw only five loaves and two small fishes to feed a multitude; and so long as material sense believed in a material man, with material needs, depending upon a material supply, the situation was obviously hopeless. There was some one there, however, who knew better. No lying argument could last long in the presence of Jesus, the Christ. He knew man to be the reflection of Spirit, sustained and maintained only by those spiritual ideas which constitute his "supply," so to speak; and could those ideas fail, or be lacking? No one who knows anything of divine metaphysics will wonder that after the multitude had eaten, "they took up of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full"! If we believe this incident, which was recorded by all four of the gospel writers, why should it be thought incredible that the application of the same understanding which fed "five thousand men, beside women and children" twenty centuries ago, should supply warmth and comfort to-day?
