Editorial January 29, 1910 Issue

LOSS AND GAIN

John B. Willis

"I cannot pray as I used to, and I am almost frightened when I think of it. I seem to have lost my God, and my heart is echoing the cry of Mary, 'They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.' " The speaker was a noble fellow, who had been sufficiently illumined through Christian Science to perceive the unworthiness of his inherited concept of Deity, and who thus found himself in the toils of that revolt from the old which prepares the way for the new. He came to open his heart respecting a matter which he rightly deemed of the deepest significance, and his surprise was no less marked than his seriousness when his friend looked at him for a moment, and then said, "Well, brother, unless your thought of God has been more exalted than that of many, this experience may prove a great blessing."

The conversation which followed covered ground that many good people would do well to think over; first of all, for the reason that an incongruous sense of God manifestly introduces an unsound timber into the very foundation of the temple of thought, and the more splendid the superstructure built thereon, the more disastrous and pitiful will seem its fall. Furthermore, the average person, even though earnest and Christian, has given little consideration to the question of the identity of his concept of God with that presented by Christ Jesus, or to the imperative need of maintaining the integrity of the divine nature in thought, quite regardless of creedal beliefs and material sense testimony.

Prevailing ideas about the nature of God are for the most part the outgrowth of the statements of Old Testament writers respecting His judgments and acts. Many of these writers evidently thought of God under the semblance of a king. They attached to His word that unquestionable authority, with the kingly exercise of which they were all too familiar. They thought of His might and majesty as superregal, of His jealousy as implacable, and of His vengeance as terrible and unsparing. Thus yielding their meditations to the mold of human experience, they acquired that anthropomorphic sense of Deity which still dominates the thought of many, and which mars in some degree the thought of all.

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