Does it occur to many of us that the will of God is a happy thing to contemplate? It is. It is joy-bringing. Its emphasis is on addition, rather than subtraction. If it subtracts, it does so only as the warm spring sun melts the frost, that the buds may unlock their cloistered treasure. God's will can be trusted. If, as the dictionary tells us, will denotes the faculty of willing, or choosing, it is certain that the will of Him who is infinitely good is only the ordaining and choosing for all of God's children of that which is harmony-producing and good-unfolding.
How has darkened material sense ever perverted this Christianly scientific conception of God and His beneficent will! For generations, unthinking and spiritually dulled mortals have laid at the door of a loving Father all the tragedies of earth. One of the much-loved early lecturers in the Christian Science movement used to tell of a woman who came to an untimely end through a most unfortunate accident. Her family and friends piously endeavored to bow in submission to what they called the divine will. But evidently this attitude did not reflect their real emotions, for soon after, a legal action was instituted against a certain company to recover damages for the accident and demise! Here was a bit of inconsistency, for if God caused the accident, the company should not have been liable. How often are resolutions drawn up starting with the unlovely "Whereas" which invariably is followed by the charge ' that a loving God, "in His inscrutable wisdom," has seen fit to take from mortal sight this brother or that sister. And even our law codes classify certain disasters as acts of God.
What a glorious service to humanity is rendered by the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, when in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" she defines God as infinite good, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Principle, Truth, Life, Love; and then in her spiritual interpretation of the Lord's Prayer, following the petition (p. 17,) "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven," she writes: "Enable us to know,—as in heaven, so on earth, —God is omnipotent, supreme." How happily, trustingly, then, may one pray, "Thy will be done"! Our petition is for light, for understanding, whereby we may know that good is All-power, that Mind, infinite intelligence, is supreme, and His law omniactive.
