David sweetly sang praises to God for His wonderful goodness to the children of men and for the righteousness of His judgments, voicing acknowledgments of God's goodness not only for himself, but for all who believed in the one God. Jehovah, as Lord of all. "They shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great goodness, and shall sing of thy righteousness," he sang. And while we may be sure that David's concept of God had not advanced to the height reached centuries after by the Prophet of Nazareth when he asserted in the plainest of language, "God is a Spirit," yet there can be no doubt that the shepherd king recognized goodness as a spiritual quality, emanating from the "father of us all." Did he not declare in the incomparable twenty-third psalm. "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever," manifestly recognizing his right to partake of the bounty which God has prepared for His children?
Christ Jesus likewise invariably recognized God as the source of all goodness. "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God," leaves no doubt as to his convictions regarding the source of all good. Mrs. Eddy no less definitely recognized goodness as an expression of the divine nature of God. On page 119 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," she declares. "God is natural good, and is represented only by the idea of goodness; while evil should be regarded as unnatural, because it is opposed to the nature of Spirit, God."
It may be truthfully asserted that mankind's progress Spiritward has been proportionate to the recognition of God as good. As it has become known that God is all good, and in consequence has no attributes of evil, knowing no hatred, malice, jealousy, or revenge, humanity has slowly progressed in its uplift out of the depths of materiality. Since the infinite good which is God, knows no evil, evil has no existence outside of human thought. This understanding has given a mighty impulse to the effort to rise into the realization of man's true selfhood as the child of God, and of his forever existence in the spiritual realm, where abides only the perfect, the beautiful, the eternal all-good. This is the lesson that Christian Scientists are learning, step by step,—a lesson which enables them to destroy the beliefs of evil, however manifested, and to establish the reality of good as God's infinite nature.
