Editorial April 25, 1942 Issue

Divine Impetus

Evelyn F. Heywood

Since God is almighty and man is the idea of God, man is the expression of almightiness. In speaking of his Father, Jesus declared, "What things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise." Likewise! There is no halfway position between infinity and finiteness, almightiness and no might. Either we are aware that there is boundless power, wisdom, Love, or we believe ourselves to be limited, inferior, inadequate. The decision lies not in what we materially perceive or compute, but in what we spiritually know.

If we are on the defensive, basing our security on that which we humanly believe ourselves as mortals to be or to possess, with reasonable grounds for thinking that with prudence and careful policy we may be able to preserve it; if we are relying hopefully though not certainly on present and potential assets, then indeed we live in a world tentative, precarious, and ill-defined. But if with the impetus of divine power, with the enterprise of divine initiative, we are prepared to scale heights rather than cling to the valley, to go down into the depths of truth rather than to remain in the shallows of belief, to dare all rather than dare nothing, then even at the expense of mistakes, fierce experiences, and harsh struggles, we learn in enduring to overcome. "To calculate one's life-prospects from a material basis, would infringe upon spiritual law and misguide human hope," writes Mary Baker Eddy on page 319 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures."

Every calculation based upon mortal premises is finite and at the mercy of those very hazards it seeks to avoid. Discounting or ignoring the divine power, which alone is power, men move in a world where fallibility and uncertainty undermine law and scatter hope. Looking to divine intelligence to guide them in all that must be humanly acquired, invented, or produced for their righteous safety and success, men find the initiative of every enterprise, the impetus to every action under the jurisdiction of good, not of evil. When the individual becomes conscious that he is one with infinite substance, enlightened of Mind, inspired of Love, how impossible he sees it to be that spiritual law should be infringed or human hope misguided; that the initiative should ever pass from the realm of Spirit; that men should be made ill, should lack, suffer, or be defeated, because of too much or too little matter!

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