MRS. EDDY once wrote to the Trustees of The Christian Science Publishing Society, "Learn by experience and careful comparison to know whence cometh your conclusions" (The Christian Science Monitor for July 2, 1919). If at every step we seek God's guidance, we shall learn "to know His voice from man's," as Mrs. Hemans says in one of her poems. We shall become more aware of the right step to take and of the right moment in which to take it. As in music the composer, through his understanding that harmony is in accordance with the law of music, perceives that here a certain chord or there a pause is needed to make the composition complete, so, in our lives, as our understanding of divine Principle increases we shall recognize, through our reliance upon God alone, what divine Principle at each moment demands we should do. Obedience to every call that seems to us to come from God, good, will enable us to discern between the mistaken impulse of the human so-called mind and the pure intuition from above. But failure to respond to spiritual intuition, due perhaps to timidity or indecision on our part,—a doubt as to whether it is the voice of God,—will leave us no farther on than we were before, no better able to recognize and follow God's call when it comes.
Perhaps there is no more striking example related in the Bible of the value of following the highest guidance we perceive than the experience of Abraham and Isaac on the mount in Moriah. Abraham, in obedience to what seemed to him to be the call of God, took the human footsteps that became apparent to him as his duty. To his immature spiritual apprehension the sacrifice required of him appeared to be the sacrifice of Isaac's earthly life. In this experience it is evident that at every point Abraham acted according to the highest understanding he had gained, and in so doing he gained a higher view. Through these faithful footsteps he came to the place of which God had told him, the place in his mental journey where he could make the only sacrifice that God demands, namely, the sacrifice of belief in matter as real. Having done this, he no longer laid his hand upon the child, no longer claimed as his own that which, in reality, exists only as God's divine idea; and this inspired spiritual understanding of life could not but be blessed.
And so it is with everyone who today is obedient to God's voice. As we learn by experience to discriminate between the true and the false, and become less distrustful of our ability to demonstrate God's guidance in our lives, the will of God is more clearly and more often instantaneously revealed to us. We place more reliance upon spiritual sense, because we find it to be accurate, as no merely human information can ever be. We find it possible to know, not through long processes of thought, but "in the twinkling of an eye," in a flash of spiritual discernment, what is the will of God in any particular case. And since all things are mental, and since everything exists in thought before it can be manifested, we become more able to perceive an obstructing error before it is materially manifested; to foresee what our Leader calls "the impending doom" (Unity of Good, p. 57), and in this way avert it.
