Editorial December 12, 1908 Issue

"WHICH ART IN HEAVEN."

John B. Willis

Life brings many experiences that beget distrust and discouragement, and the peace and happiness of the average individual depend largely upon how well he has learned, in his thinking, to bring every event into right relations with some abiding fundamental of revealed truth, some aspect of the infinite good which is clearly defined and immovable in the embrace of his faith and understanding.

Little children make their mistakes, and so do we. They are troubled over the transient and the trivial, and so are we. In all their experiences, whether of gladness or of grief, they flee to the parental love for safety, communion, or comfort. Here unhappily the parallelism ends with, not so do we. The average man, though Christian, has not acquired the habit of instinctive reversion to his heavenly Father, in the hour of trial; he has not yet learned in a practical, problem-solving way that "divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need" (Science and Health, p. 494).

One can readily divine the seriousness of the hazard, the inevitable ill to the child, if he did not associate all his experiences with the brooding love that so instantly and so gladly answers to his call. Were he not thus love-enthralled, it would be simply impossible for him to escape the dangers, seen and unseen, which crowd the pathway of youth; and the lesson for us is plain. If we have not yet learned in every event and circumstance of life to turn to the Father "in heaven." with the realization that His eternal harmony and peace is reflected in all His creation, we cannot possibly know the comfort and safety which motherhood means for the little ones. Christian Science brings a new thought of "heaven." as the all-inclusive harmony of the kingdom of Truth, and a new sense of the exclusion of the disharmonies of human history from divine consciousness, and hence from real being. It thus awakens that realization of the undisturbed continuity of the manifestations of Truth and Love, which becomes a heaven of refuge in every storm and stress of experience. Knowing with Browining that
God's in His heaven:
the Christian Scientist improves upon the poet's phrase in declaring that
All's right with [His] world;
and he is thus able rightly relate in thought the world of material sense to the immutable facts of being by knowing the unreality of all its vaunted prerogatives and power. He is able to bring human events into logical realtion with the fundamentals of spiritual thought, and his further ability to demonstrate health and peace in so doing gives him that sense of superiority to mortal experience which ever marks the Christlike man.