Those who have not yet found Christian Science and its comforting assurance in these days of mounting human turmoil and misgiving might understandably echo the anguished and poignant cry recorded in Jeremiah (8:20,22): "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.... Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?"
To the distressed queries of mankind today, Christian Scientists are responding with a loving, affirmative, "Yes, there is balm; there is healing; there is hope!" Of all people in this critical hour of human history Christian Scientists gratefully stand "ready always," in the words of Peter, "to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you" (I Pet. 3:15). Christian Scientists could not do otherwise, for they have found a religion of assurance based on enduring and tangible proof of the blessings awaiting everyone who humbly and sincerely seeks day by day to embrace and truly live its teachings.
The priceless gift of spiritual understanding in the very midst of difficulties pressing for solution enabled Job to exclaim (Job 19:25), "I know that my redeemer liveth," and thence to achieve his own freedom, dominion, and peace. With this assurance of a knowable, intimate Redeemer of humanity, Christian Science often bestows its first gentle comfort upon the individual approaching this religion and its teachings for the first time. Multitudes of men and women, including the writer, have forsaken their trust in cynicism and negative "realism" and have taken their first firm hold upon Christian Science when they discovered that it is not mere optimism, not a humanly mental system or scheme of wishing oneself into well-being, or a veneering over of the troubles of the world with trite sentiments or emotional platitudes.
