ON page 100 of "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes, "Pure humanity, friendship, home, the interchange of love, bring to earth a foretaste of heaven." Such a statement is an assurance that a better understanding of God will bring more of heaven into our experience here and now. To understand God is to understand something of what love is, and to see all things made lovely in its heavenly light.
As we progress in the understanding of Christian Science, we have a right to expect a wider and fuller expression of good. Happiness is a normal and natural state, and sorrow and disaster have no place in the experience of God's child, Mind's idea. But so accustomed are we, through false teaching, to think of God as requiring us to give up everything we hold dear in order to serve Him acceptably, that this false concept is liable to be carried along with us for some time after we have accepted the teachings of Christian Science. As we learn more of reality through the study of Christian Science, we find that friendships based merely on the attraction of the material senses cannot satisfy the spiritual selfhood awakened in us by the voice of Truth. If we are willing to be taught of God, these false concepts of friendship fade out of our experience without a struggle; and we are glad to let them go, because an understanding of the real has uncovered to us the worthlessness of the unreal. With the Apostle Paul we find that as we put on immortality in our thinking, mortality is put off. Since everything material is negative, or the absence of the positive, we can never scientifically give up error until we have gained its opposite—truth. For every one of us there may be a wilderness experience, but it need not be a long-drawn-out experience, if we are obedient. The children of Israel sojourned in the wilderness for forty years because of their disobedience and unbelief. Had they believed the report of Caleb and Joshua, and trusted God, they might have gone up and conquered immediately.
As the land of Canaan was a land flowing "with milk and honey," surely the land of Christian Science, the consciousness of spiritual good, must flow with blessings! The Psalmist saw this when he wrote, "In thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore." The first obstacle to happiness that Christian Science overcomes for a large number of people is that of ill health—physical inharmony. Every student of Christian Science is firmly convinced that it is not God's will that we should be sick, any more than it is God's will that we should be sinners! Yet, as we well know, sickness is not only delineated on the physical body; there are sicknesses of the heart, expressed in unhappy circumstances, bringing perhaps suffering that seems more real to the sufferer than any physical disorder. Perhaps the student of Christian Science has turned to its teachings because of the barrenness and emptiness of his experience, because some friend has proved unfaithful, some heart's idol has been found with unstable feet of clay. Such a one, struggling with a sense of loneliness and disappointed hope, may confidently expect to find that the understanding of God as the one infinite, unchanging Friend will heal his hurt, not partially but completely. And this truth, affirmed constantly and untiringly, will be accompanied by "signs following" and be expressed to him in a way that will meet his present human need.
