IN prayer the Christian Scientist listens for God's voice, willing to obey it. As the tumult of personal sense is hushed, he responds joyfully to the "Be thou healed!" of the Christ. In prayer his gaze is fixed on God, his thought turned away from the error from which he seeks escape. In a little while he may return to his problem, but it will not wear the same threatening face. It will no longer loom up as a question without an answer, for in the heavenly glow of answered prayer the problem and its solution will be joined, and the answer will continue to unfold until it occupies the place which the difficulty seemed to claim before.
The sacred experience of an awakening spiritual sense of man's dominion, guided through divine Science to the realization of omnipotent and omnipresent good, is true prayer, in which human desire humbly and without conditions trusts all to God and is satisfied. There is no other way by which glimpses of man in Science, the son of God, can be gained. Man's God-sustained authority for selfless living, loving, working, and rejoicing is discerned through such prayer. With the laying down of selfish motives comes the proof through healing that God and His child are eternally and inseparably linked. As man stands revealed through prayer in Christian Science, spiritualized consciousness declares in the words of the Messiah, "I am from above."
The intense conflict of Jesus in the treasury of the temple, recorded in the eighth chapter of St. John's Gospel, traces the pattern of our own spiritual unfolding. Intrenched in all the craftiness and pride of the law, materialistic theology, and human knowledge, and aroused by the positive evidence of spiritual healing which Jesus gave before the eyes of the people, mortal mind, as manifested by the Pharisees, was trying then, as it tries today, to defend and justify itself by the use of a favorite weapon. It was trying to discredit Jesus in order to discredit the truth which he taught and practiced. In the face of this undeserved attack Christ Jesus did not yield. He refused to entertain a single suggestion which challenged his conscious unity with God. Point by point he met the arguments of his opponents; he continued to affirm his spiritual being and to repudiate unflinchingly each accusation that man is less than Godlike in origin and existence. Even a threat of physical violence did not daunt the Way-shower. We are told that he "went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by." It is not surprising that in the next chapter it is related that one of the people, a man healed of blindness by Jesus, became bold enough, when questioned, to reason with the Jews, saying, "If this man were not of God, he could do nothing."
