SOMEONE has said that the individual is always alone. Even when surrounded by hundreds of persons, he is always alone with his thoughts. While feeling a sense of loneliness, a Christian Scientist pondered this remark. Then as she was willing honestly to look this belief in the face, she recognized it as a sense of emptiness, which needed to be filled with the understanding of God's omnipresence. Suddenly she thought, Is not the word "loneliness" an ugly disguise for the word "alone"? At that moment she realized that the word "alone" might have the beautiful meaning of being at one with God.
From a dictionary she found that the word "alone" is formed of "all" plus "one." Consequently, she saw it was her privilege to prove that loneliness is only a lack of the glorious realization and appreciation of the fact that man is all-one with God. For a moment, however, the student struggled with the belief that God and man are two, for with mathematical certainty when a person adds one and one he gets two. But in order to be added to God, All, would not man necessarily first have been separated from Him? Then she knew that the sense of loneliness sprang from the subtle belief that man is separated from good, from God.
Jesus no doubt startled the populace when he said, "I and my Father are one." Mrs. Eddy similarly startles mankind when she says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 465, 466), "Principle and its idea is one, and this one is God, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Being, and His reflection is man and the universe." Christ Jesus' declaration of the Son's oneness with the Father was not understood, and was not proved and made universally workable, until our Leader's discovery of man's unity with the Father.
