Editorial April 25, 1942 Issue

Do We Ask Enough?

Alfred Pittman

Christian Science has brought to mankind again the priceless gift of directly effective prayer, as practiced by Christ Jesus, and has shown that now as in his time its scope is not limited. By such prayer, disease is continually being healed, and distress of every other sort overcome. For vast numbers of modern people, also, increased understanding, larger opportunities, improved relationships, and usefulness and happiness surpassing what they had hoped for, have appeared in the same way. The results have come sometimes through persistent praying, and sometimes, indeed very often, through one brief prayer. They have furnished convincing proof that the admonition of Christ Jesus, "Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full," is for all men in all time: that it does not set too high a standard for anyone.

Christian Science not only makes it practical to obtain answers to prayer, but shows why the answers are obtainable, and why it is natural for them not to be limited. It shows that good is not in reality exceptional and restricted, as it seems to human sense, but that it is infinite and omnipresent; that it is identical with God, who is All. What seems therefore to be the absence of good—of health, strength, substance, harmony, happiness, or anything else that is needed—is only a darkened and illusory state of consciousness, which fails to perceive the divine presence. And as men turn from the mistaken concepts which constitute this mental darkness—from those masked as good, as well as those frankly evil—and earnestly seek reality, they gain a true and clear view of being, which dispels the illusion of absent or limited good. And this is prayer and the answer.

"It is ignorance and false belief, based on a material sense of things, which hide spiritual beauty and goodness," Mary Baker Eddy points out in the Christian Science textbook,"Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 304). And elsewhere in the same work (p. 15) she says, "In the quiet sanctuary of earnest longings, we must deny sin and plead God's allness," continuing in the same paragraph, "Such prayer is answered, in so far as we put our desires into practice."

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