In that wonderful farewell to his disciples, Christ Jesus promised to send them the Comforter; and in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 55) Mrs. Eddy writes, "This Comforter I understand to be Divine Science." It may seem strange to think of Science being the Comforter, yet a true and exact knowledge of the divine, of God and man, is the only real comforter there is. Jesus had this true knowledge to a greater extent than anyone before him, but he expected his disciples and followers to have the same knowledge, and so gain his peace and joy. He declared that this knowledge of the only true God, and of himself, was life eternal, and that those who kept his saying should never see death; yet for centuries men have continued to believe that death is inevitable, and have suffered the consequences in loss and separation. To Jesus there was neither loss nor separation; he looked back into the past and communed with Moses and Elias, and he enabled even his disciples to see and recognize these individualities; he looked far into the future and saw that those who should believe on him through the word of his followers would be one with him and the Father. He saw life as eternal, indestructible.
It is in her book "Retrospection and Introspection" (p. 60) that Mrs. Eddy writes: "Science reveals Life as a complete sphere, as eternal, self-existent Mind; material sense defines life as a broken sphere, as organized matter, and mind as something separate from God." This simile of a complete sphere gives a wonderful sense of comfort and protection. Some hint of this can be gained even from the human sense of the universe. Standing on some high place, some mountain top, looking around to the circle of the horizon and above to "that inverted bowl we call the sky," as Omar Khayyam expresses it, we are in the center of a sphere; wherever we move we are still in the center, and around us is our universe. It is impossible to move out of it, or to lose it. And so wherever we go we are always surrounded by the presence and protection of God. His ideas, His children, are all safe in His keeping, and the more we know of God the more we know of His ideas. The complete sphere of Life, God and His universe, includes all His ideas; not one of them can ever be lost or separated from Him, or from any of His other ideas. It is the false sense of a broken sphere and of mind as something separate from God, that leads to broken homes and hearts and to a seeming separation from good,—from that which brings joy and satisfaction. We seem to lose our friends because we have seen and known them, not as ideas of God, but as material, finite, human beings, liable to death; and so when the thing which we greatly feared has come upon us, we suffer heartache and sorrow; and only that true knowledge of God and of man in His image and likeness can heal the sorrow.
A poet has well expressed the human longing in the lines:—
