Article April 29, 1911 Issue

THE GOOD OF TODAY

GRACE POTTER.

"To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings." So rings that mighty prelude in the glad song of salvation, the opening line in the introduction of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." This brief sentence prescribes the divine remedy for a world of woe made up of yesterday's failures and tomorrow's fears. Thought is turned away from the whole mass of mortal belief to reliance on infinite good, which blesses man infinitely today. If one is only awake to catch this strain of immortal music, only willing to open wide his consciousness and let it in, he will be so filled with the blessing of today's good that he will find no room to entertain anything else.

What each one knows of infinite good today is enough to meet today's suggestions of evil. It is not today's evil which oppresses us, but our cumulative belief in what is past and what may come. If we do not dispose of today's evil, it has a way of accumulating; likewise, if we use today's good, it increases for us. We need not cling to yesterday's hoard of "better beliefs;" they can do nothing for us except to stand behind today's more enlightened understanding; nor need we reach forward to grasp what tomorrow may hold for us of progress and growth. Indeed, the use of today's understanding and opportunities is the only means by which we may expect to grow out of yesterday's limitations into larger tomorrows. Surely today is big enough in which to exercise our present conception of Deity, and inasmuch as we can never hope to find Him either in past or future, but only in the present, why search the future or the past?

The ancient belief in a God of tomorrow, of a far-off salvation and heaven which is always coming and never arriving, has too long hindered mankind from working for the present realizations of good. Such a belief, too, betrays human thinking into strange fallacies concerning the nature of God and His relationship to man. God is not the God of dead yesterdays but of living todays, and Christ demands that we let the dead bury its dead and follow him in today's doing. "Take the manna of today," sings the old familiar hymn; and from the time of the journey through the wilderness until now, this manna has never been known to fail, has always been sufficient to supply the need of all who have been ready to accept it humbly and trustingly.

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