Editorial January 4, 1900 Issue

Christian Science Prayer

Editor

The whole groundwork of Christian Science is prayer. Its achievements in healing sickness are the result of prayer. Without prayer there is, there can be, no real healing. The Christian Science prayer is not an emotional or ecstatic supplication, petition, or wrestling so much as it is a deep, profound, and abiding conviction of the all-presence and all-power of God. This prayer is instant and constant. It is the ever-present consciousness that man is in harmony with God. It is the realization that man, in his true relation to God, reflects health and harmony rather than disease and discord. This is the plain teaching of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker G. Eddy; and this altitude of prayer we must reach ere we shall be able to pray aright and in such a way as to receive answer thereto.

Our text-book, from beginning to end, is a lesson on prayer. To the extent that we understand and live its teaching we are in an unceasingly prayerful state of mind. Its repeated injunction is that we must have in us the Mind which Jesus had; we must be about the Father's business as was he; we must reflect the Divine character as did he; we must be in the world, and yet not of it, as he was in it and not of it; we must worship the Lord our God with all our might, mind, and soul, as he worshiped God with all his might, mind, and soul; we must have no other gods before God; we must yield our mortal selfhood to all the requirements of Divine selfhood, thus reaching that perfection which Jesus demanded in his great injunction to his disciples, and, through them, to all the world: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect."

The demands seem great. If we were to trust to material sense and rely upon human strength, we should stand aghast before them; but the great glory of our textbook is that it turns us away from the material senses and toward the realization of the omnipotent Good that reveals to us the possibility of compliance therewith.

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