Editorial December 1, 1906 Issue

"AND BE YE THANKFUL"

John B. Wills

There are many children who are thankful for many things. One is glad because an appetite or desire has been gratified, and when a further want is met he will be glad again; meantime he is sorry for what seems to him the too-long intervals between his successive satisfactions. Another is no less thankful for his gifts but more thankful for the giver. He thinks of the labor and love which have been wrought into his gifts, and his appreciation of the unselfishness and faithfulness of father and mother leads him to be grateful and glad every day. Between these attitudes of thought and conduct there is a great gulf, and the contrast between the returns of comfort and joy they bring to benefactors is correspondingly great.

Most grown people are very like children, and many of them also need to be reminded that the worthier gratitude is that which is thoughtful and appreciative of the love that impels the bestowment of good. We may well give thanks for our country, our home, our health, our friends, and our creature comforts; but if the possession of these is the chiefest occasion of our song, then will our happiness prove intermittent and in no sense superior to circumstance. Safe anchorage for gladness is not found in human experience,—not in the material sign, though its possession may in our thought gather to itself the sweetest of pleasures. The springs of true and unfailing gratitude well up from the deeps of spiritual realization, and we shall not come upon them elsewhere. To know, amid all the possible changes of human life, that Truth, the eternal good, standeth fast, and is for us; that the reliability of the elementary forces of nature, the sure return of the rain and the harvest, the recurring splendors of spring and sunset, all speak for the law-abiding continuity of the manifestations of Mind; and to know, further, that these manifestations express infinite Love,—this is to find a resting-place for lasting faith, an inspiration for perennial thanksgiving.

This Christian Science has brought to men,—a soul-satisfying knowledge of Truth, the clearer apprehension of the righteousness of our God, the immutable Principle of all being,—and this gain is established in the practical proofs of the eternal verity of our Leader's words, when she says that "divine Love cannot be deprived of its manifestation, or object; that joy cannot be turned into sorrow, for sorrow is not the master of joy; that good can never produce evil, nor Life result in death" (Science and Health, p. 304).

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