All those who in the world at the present time are following after righteousness must find great comfort from the promises in the Bible. Take for example the assurance given by Isaiah when he says, "The Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody." The world is also blessed immeasurably in the records which are now available of the way in which the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science thought out the various problems of human existence, working as she did from the standpoint of Principle. Her writings reveal the way in which her thoughts were busy continually with harmony, health, happiness, and the true government of man by God.
It was natural then for Mrs. Eddy to refer frequently to music in illustration of her theme. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 304) she says, "Harmony is produced by its Principle, is controlled by it and abides with it." She; applies this by saying, "Harmony in man is as beautiful as in music, and discord is unnatural, unreal." Then she proceeds to show how the sense of harmony can be lost through misunderstanding, saying: "Left to the decisions of material sense, music is liable to be misapprehended and lost in confusion. Controlled by belief, instead of understanding, music is, must be, imperfectly expressed. So man, not understanding the Science of being,—thrusting aside his divine Principle as incomprehensible,—is abandoned to conjectures, left in the hands of ignorance, placed at the disposal of illusions, subjected to material sense which is discord. A discontented, discordant mortal is no more a man than discord is music."
We are all more or less aware of the fact that attempts have been made to degrade music to the service of sensualism and to call that music which is the effect of misapprehension, unbelief, and misunderstanding in regard to spiritual harmony. Indeed we have been taught that that actually constitutes man which expresses inharmony, confusion, and actual discord. The problem then is to find out how there may be a return to the true source of blessing and harmony, so that as man is found in Science so in the human heart shall be found gladness and gratitude, thanksgiving and praise.
