Article June 20, 1908 Issue

DEVOTION

LIEUT.-COL. W. E. FELL.

If there is one consideration more than another which lifts our love and gratitude to the Founder of Christian Science beyond all merely human expression, it is that she has shown us how to pray,—to pray in the way which Jesus taught, "in spirit and in truth." She tells us that "we worship spiritually, only as we cease to worship materially" (Science and Health, p. 140). The Master had said, "Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss;" and again. "If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it." The disciples besought him, "Lord, teach us to pray;" and that the Christian Scientist knows how to pray, that he has been taught and has profited by the teaching, is evidenced in prayer answered, when the sick are healed, sinners reformed, and sorrow turned into joy.

Of the first importance in our progress up the ladder of prayer to the kingdom of heaven—prayer realized— is the knowledge of how not to pray. Had Christendom closely followed Jesus' teaching as now explained by Mrs. Eddy, there would at this time be few if any discordant conditions left to vex and scourge humanity, for we should be in the realization of man's sonship as an heir of God, joint-heir with Christ, exercising man's primal privilege,—dominion over all. No religionist need remain in any doubt as to whether men have or have not hitherto prayed "amiss." We have but to turn a sorrowing gaze on sick, sinning, and suffering humanity to receive a convincing answer. We must, then, change our method of prayer, and in so radical a fashion as to bring to our consciousness the harmonious condition promised by the Saviour as an answer to true prayer. Having recognized the futility of our previous efforts, it would be fatuous to continue in the same course.

The Master said, "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil." Is not this, then, the point of departure between the prayer we used to utter and the prayer we now pray in scientifically understood Christianity? To destroy "the works of the devil"—this is surely the denouncement of sin, sickness, and death, the self-constituted suppositional opponents of God,—omnipresence and the one and only presence, Life, Truth, and Love. Christ Jesus condemned to oblivion these mockeries of good, and to-day as then, Truth casts them out and calls them devil, evil. But did we not, before the understanding of the Science of being came to enlighten us, credit God who is Love with being the source of these very "works" that Jesus denounced? How supremely foolish! Would Jesus cast out that which God had made? To-day's enlightenment has changed our concept of the one to whom our prayers were addressed; from a belief in a God who knows both good and evil, to the worship of God as infinite good,— "of purer eyes than to behold evil."

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