The words of Isaiah, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God," find a response in the poem quoted by Mary Baker Eddy in her book "Retrospection and Introspection" (p. 95):
"Ask God to give thee skill
In comfort's art:
That thou may'st consecrated be
And set apart
Unto a life of sympathy.
For heavy is the weight of ill
In every heart;
And comforters are needed much
Of Christlike touch."
Jesus knew how to give the needed comfort. Once when he was passing through the city of Nain he saw a funeral procession and with it the sorrowing mother, bereft of her only son. She was obviously in great need of comfort. He did not give it to her through human sympathy, which would have agreed that she had suffered irreparable loss. He gave it even as he himself had felt the comfort of Truth. He understood that no child of God has cause for grief. He told the mother not to weep, and proved that there was no reason for her tears by showing her that her son was living and not dead.
Jesus knew it to be impossible for man to lose life, right relationship, or joy, because he understood the nature of God. He realized that a loving Father does not give blessings, and with the same hand rob His children of good. He knew that God, who is divine Life, never causes or permits death, and that man, who is the image and likeness of God, reflects Life eternally. These spiritual facts comforted him and enabled him to express this comfort to others.
One of the glories of these days in the world's history is the generous impulsion which is awakening in the hearts of humanity to comfort and to share. The final record of this period in human experience will have permanently stamped upon it a spiritual awakening and its resultant progress in Christian character, of which we are having rich evidence. Men rise to meet the acute demands of the times with spontaneous self-sacrifice, yielding their human sense of comfort and security in order to give the full strength of their support to help in overthrowing the aggressive beliefs which would attempt to deprive mankind of comfort, security, and freedom. This nobility of motive and action is part of the real and lasting history of these days. Even thus did the three Hebrews carry with them after their trial in the fiery furnace, not disastrous aftereffects of the fire, but the vision of God's power and glory which had come to them in winning their victory.
It is right and necessary that people should be inspired to express their loving generosity in warm bounty, and in every practical human way. But an even greater opportunity comes to the Christian Scientist at this hour to obey the divine admonition, "Comfort ye." We are told on page 3 of Mrs. Eddy's Message to The Mother Church for 1900: "The right thinker and worker does his best, and does the thinking for the ages. No hand that feels not his help, no heart his comfort." We are led by the study of Christian Science to understand God's comfort, and we know that the expression of His spiritual comfort is the most effective way to meet the needs of humanity. In "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy tells us (p. 102): "God's ways are not ours. His pity is expressed in modes above the human." And she adds: "The sympathy of His eternal Mind is fully expressed in divine Science, which blots out all our iniquities and heals all our diseases. Human pity often brings pain." The material testimony regarding world conditions reports pitiful situations of critical need, but the human sympathy which accepts this record of evil as a reality does not lift this burden of mesmerism from a deceived world. We must not lend our thoughts and tongues and pens to the magnifying of evil as a great and powerful force capable of dethroning God and replacing His loving and wise government with tyrannical cruelty. We read in the Bible that "the son of perdition... as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God." We note that he deceives only himself with the suggestion that he is God. Therefore we can declare and prove our freedom from any share in this mesmerism by making sure that, in all we say and think, we magnify the Lord and not the carnal mind's claim to activity and power.
It is the reality and indestructibility of good which make evil impossible. It is our realization and acknowledgment of the allness and omniaction of God, divine good, which make it impossible for us to be mesmerized by aggressive suggestions that evil has presence and activity. In "Unity of Good" (p. 18) Mrs. Eddy writes: "God says, I show My pity through divine law, not through human. It is My sympathy with and My knowledge of harmony (not inharmony) which alone enable Me to rebuke, and eventually destroy, every supposition of discord."
God sees no evil. He knows His own allness, and by being All, He proves evil nothing. As we awake to conscious reflection of God's knowing of His own allness, we also know only the good and true. In this way we help to lift from the world the onerous deception which would impose on human thinking the suggestion that evil is a power, capable of robbing man of his heritage of security, sustenance, strength, fearlessness, joy, peaceful progress. Mrs. Eddy says (No and Yes, p. 30): "God pities our woes with the love of a Father for His child,—not by becoming human, and knowing sin, or naught, but by removing our knowledge of what is not. He could not destroy our woes totally if He possessed any knowledge of them. His sympathy is divine, not human. It is Truth's knowledge of its own infinitude which forbids the genuine existence of even a claim to error."
We do not set forth to alleviate human woe, first admitting it to be a great reality that needs healing. If our loving human activities proceed from the realization that God is impartial Love, giving abundant good to all His children, then our actions will be an intelligent evidence of this divine fact. We cannot begin our work with the false premise that some of His children are being neglected by their Father, and that our human efforts must make up for this deficiency. Enlightened spiritual compassion enables us to carry out right human activities so that they declare, "Blessed be God, ... who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God."
