It should seem obvious upon even a moment's reflection that God will govern the future as He has governed the past, that the loving Principle of all the universe will be and remain loving and protective as He has always been. Yet, upon an analysis of human thought, mortals will be surprised to discover how fixed is the assumption that some evil of great consequence will surely befall. Two reasons may be assigned for this conviction of evil; one, a failure to understand that God has indeed preserved the world and all its inhabitants in all times past; the other, the failure to discern that belief in the reality of matter is the cause of most discord. When the truth is discerned with respect to these two factors, even the claim of ignorance in the world in times past will cease to seem real to the human thought, and the harmonious development of true manhood in history will then be recognized and understood.
The human mind, when uninstructed by Christian Science, links existence itself with the dissolving phantasms of its dreams; therefore it fears the evils which it forebodes, because they inhere in the basic assumption. It is only in the Science of true being that the self-destruction of material concepts is deprived of its power to instil fear by the understanding that all that is good and real is beyond impairment or effect from mortal processes.
Humanity, when prosperous, often fears and expects reverses, ignorant of the fact that true prosperity cannot be reversed because it is upheld of God, and ignorant that the reversal of the false sense of prosperity can only have one effect,—that of leading thought to the true idea. In its successes it may look forward to failure, in safety it sometimes fears accident, and the leading characteristic of its estimate of human life is its conviction that it must terminate in death. This catalogues only a few of the anxieties of mortal thought and hardly mentions those sins and sensualities deemed pleasurable, whose tenacity rests upon the desire of mortals to keep hold of them and upon the fear of losing them.
