Who of us has not had occasion to feel how inadequate words are to express gratitude, or been visited with a pang of regret when remembering how fleeting our own gratitude, as well as that of others, is apt to seem? Indeed, one is sometimes tempted to say, "The human race is an ungrateful race." This lack of responsiveness for benefits received arises not so much from individual and collective apathy as from ignorance of what constitutes true gratitude. This ignorance can be overcome only as we gain a fuller understanding of the nature of true giving and receiving, thus eliminating the false, worldly standards by which these two essential activities are commonly measured. It is only through his own clarified insight that a Christian Scientist comes into a true knowledge of the nature and influence of gratitude, which is vastly different from that accorded it in the general thought.
Through Christian Science one learns that gratitude is a quality of love showing itself in human affairs as beneficence and thankfulness. He finds he has cause for unspeakable gratitude when, in corresponding degree to his use of it, he experiences immunity from the shafts of hatred, whether shown as envy, jealousy, malice, lust, or merely as overemphasized variance of opinion on which to hang unjustifiable oppositions; and his gratitude gains in glory as he learns, also, that more and more he becomes incapable of acting as an instrument by which evil in any degree whatever can be directed toward another. This freedom from any possibility of being either the unwitting or the acquiescing victim of malpractice, or of being the ignorant or intentional perpetrator of this greatest of wrongs, is the outcome of the fact that gratitude and wrong thinking never go hand in hand. The true and the false can never be one. Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 3), "If we are ungrateful for Life, Truth, and Love, and yet return thanks to God for all blessings, we are insincere and incur the sharp censure our Master pronounces on hypocrites." Does not this warning declaration show clearly that the grateful person is the sincere person? And sincerity, as we know, belongs to love.
A Christian Scientist's gratitude as expressed at the Wednesday evening meetings, is far more than a verbal or perfunctory acknowledgment of thanks due to our revered Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science; it is not a religious form for effect. It is an irresistible, natural outflowing of human affection being redeemed from its own weaknesses and self-seeking. This outflowing, like a river seeking its ultimate source, the sea, is purified through activity. Just so, gratitude reaches out and above the merely human conception of thanksgiving, and thus through right activity is purified, until at last every taint of earthly seeking and getting and of consideration of personality as the cause for gratitude is dissolved by Love itself; for "every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights," and gratitude is a gift, a gift of unspeakable beauty. Filled with love, it must ever be active; for an inactive quality of love would lessen Love's perfection, would infringe its everlastingness. This we know to be unthinkable, since God is Love, and Love is Life, and there is no one inspiration more potent than gratitude to keep human love active. Gratitude thus helps to dispel fear, because it recognizes the presence of good; and to the degree that it does this, it drives out fear, since fear is the shadow of evil, and evil and good cannot abide together. At no point do they combine or make a real contact.
