Articles

The world, seeking for happiness, has long considered love as one of its principal aids in the quest, although it is constantly finding its false sense of love crumbling into ashes. When this stage is reached, many people turn to God, in whom they have believed to a certain extent, and cry out vainly for His help to restore to them something which, because of its mistaken basis, never was more than an illusion.

Consecrated Christian Scientists should be awake to the claims of the pernicious argument which mortal mind calls fatalism, because of the persistence of the suggestion that fate and chance play an important part in the everyday life of human beings. The belief that God knows aught of evil, or that He permits His children to be affected by it, is early learned to be false in the study of Christian Science.

The cords of human sympathy have often been touched when loved ones who have read the Biblical promises and accounts of healing have petitioned their heavenly Father to restore them to health and usefulness, yet have continued to suffer, with no apparent answer to their prayers. Some sufferers, fearing that they may be asking amiss when they pray for health, add to their request, "If it be Thy will," believing that it may be a part of God's plan that they should suffer.

In 1901, in her Message to The Mother Church for that year, Mary Baker Eddy paid reverent and inspiring tribute to the spirituallyminded men under whose tutelage she had received her early religious training. "The lives of those old-fashioned leaders of religion," she wrote ( p.

Twice each year the Christian Science Quarterly contains a Lesson entitled "God the Only Cause and Creator. " Therein is always clearly set forth the eternal verity that God, good, being the only cause, evil is neither a cause nor an effect.

“My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

Because of distressful occurrences which seemed rampant in the world about them, Jesus once spoke to his disciples these comforting words: "In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. " He did not deny the appearance of difficulties and disappointments, but the implication was that since he had overcome evil conditions sufficiently to rise above them, so could they.

Every man, woman, and child, whether rich or poor, prosperous or unsuccessful, provider or recipient, must eventually learn what is his real need, what is his true source of supply, and how to receive from its bountiful store. That Jesus of Nazareth understood God to be the source of supply was seen in his reference to the multitude who hungered, when he said to his disciples, "They need not depart; give ye them to eat.

" When men are cast down"! These words, written many centuries ago, are yet vividly descriptive of the human race today, when men seem cast down into the slough of materialism, where values are valueless and reasoning is based on a confusion of false concepts; when men's hearts are failing them for fear and they are crying, "Is there no way out?" How radiantly shines the promise of old, the promise which is finding its fulfillment today, "When men are cast down, then thou shalt say, There is lifting up"! The Church of Christ, Scientist, is saying to the world today: Here is lifting up, lifting up out of fear into faith, out of stress into peace, out of greed into glory, out of lust into purity, out of hate into love, out of death into life. Here, in the revelation of Truth, is lifting up into complete salvation for all mankind.

Among the beautiful and instructive parables that Christ Jesus used to elucidate the spiritual truths which he taught is the story of the good shepherd. He pointed out that the shepherd enters by the door of the sheepfold, while the thief and robber gets inside in some other way.