Article June 24, 1911 Issue

"THE LOVING ACTIVITY OF GOOD"

CLAIR D. VALLETTE

The student of Christian Science is taught that God is good, the divine Principle, Love; and that, since God, good, is the one source of action, all life and activity is the manifestation of "the loving activity of good," as it has been aptly termed. Hence, because all activity is the manifestation of good, then evil has neither expression nor activity.

At a time when activity as expressed by conditions and events had resulted in disappointment and denial of things which it seemed to be right to have and to do, a student of Christian Science was aware of the belief of discouragement knocking at the door of consciousness. Such understanding as he had of the Science of the Christ, Truth, seemed futile and his use of it foolishness. While waiting to see a friend who was otherwise engaged for a short time, he walked down to the Chicago river and watched the clear water rushing tumultuously by. It was brought to his recollection that it ran from Lake Michigan into the drainage canal, and through the Illinois and Mississippi rivers to the Gulf of Mexico. This canal had been constructed to convey the sewage of Chicago. It purified its contents by the same law that running streams are purified, by flushing with additional quantities of pure water, in this case drawn from the lake, and by aeration caused by the agitation of the flow of the stream.

He remembered that only a few years before the river seemed to be a foul, evil-smelling, almost stagnant open sewer, emptying into the lake; but the sewage of the city was no longer forced into the lake to contaminate the water supply of the people, and the loving activity of good had reversed the current, replaced the defiled contents with cleansing waters, and purified and used the old channel as a means of good. Here he was reminded that Christian Science thus comes into the life of men. It turns their thoughts away from the defilements of materiality to the purity of spiritual reality. It makes thought which was foul pure through the cleansing "flood-tides of Love" (Science and Health, p. 201). It purified and utilizes old channels as a means of good.

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