Article November 9, 1907 Issue

DRAWING NIGH TO GOD

CLARENCE W. CHADWICK.

Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.—James.

The student of Christian Science is profoundly grateful for the privilege of knowing how to draw nigh to God. Under the teaching of scholastic theology he had found this a difficult probelm to solve, for the reason that God was presented to him as a good-and-evil God, animated by love at one time and by anger and hatred at another. Believing God to be endowed with his own human attributes, he was more often inclined to get farther away from such a God instead of getting closer to Him. There was very little in such teaching to inspire any closer relationship than already existed, since it would naturally mean a closer scrutiny and knowledge on the part of God of the very qualities that would deserve punishment at His hands. The student mayhap reasoned thus: If two human beings are under the control of anger and hate, the farther apart they keep the better for both; and why not the same with myself and God, if God be humanly changeable and liable to almost any phase of human error?

This unfortunate teaching of the past has driven many a poor sufferer to say in all sincerity and honesty, when appealing to Christian Science for help, "I want to be healed, but I don't want to be told anything more about God." And no wonder, when one stops to ponder the common view of God which declares Him capable of enacting what even a human parent would not be guilty of doing to his child! It takes only a short time to convince such a seeker that the God of Christian Science is an all-good God, too pure to behold iniquity, and too loving and kind and merciful and compassionate to inflict any form of evil upon His children. He begins to study the Christian Science text-book, Science and Health, and as he applies the rules laid down for a scientific knowledge of the living God, he begins to realize that God is "a very present help in trouble," and that as he approaches the Divine presence he loses his sense of evil and of an evil power. He learns by degrees to appeal intelligently and courageously to this God for help in every hour of need, knowing that He has only good to give out to His child; that He has health and strength in abundance to bestow upon man; that He healeth all our ailments instead of visiting upon us some dread disease and then refusing to heal it, thus leaving us at the mercy of chance and change.

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