Article August 12, 1911 Issue

LOVE'S BURDEN-BEARING

E. HOWARD GILKEY.

There is a general acceptance of the fact that to each individual there come periods when it would seem that the burdens of mortal experience are beyond his ability to stand up under them. They may be burdens of ill health, of domestic life, of business activities, or the cares of a professional career; in some one or other of the departments of human life each individual suddenly becomes aware in an unexpected moment that a burden has been fastened upon him through some mistake, perchance, of his own, and he is at once put to the task of removing it or else of suffering a continued inconvenience or disability.

It is the problem of removing these burdens which makes mortal experience unhappy and distasteful to all humanity at times. Not that one would get rid of life, it is only of the burdens which seem to accompany it that he would be free; but until one meets with Christian Science he has no reliable chart of life, and no unfailing rule of conduct is given whereby these burdens may be removed. Then the struggle arrives at the point in which human rules of conduct are discarded for that universal and eternal rule given by Christ Jesus, when he said, "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; ... and ye shall find rest unto your souls." Until Christian Science was discovered by Mrs. Eddy, and was revealed to the world with such proofs of power that mankind willingly or unwillingly admitted Christian Science to a recognized place in its affairs, at least the modern world had no key to the real meaning of Jesus' words, nor did it do more than yield mere mechanical assent to them, hungering though men were to learn of him and find the rest he promised.

"Come unto me," said the Master tenderly, as with his understanding of human weakness and its great distance from spiritual Truth he gazed into the faces of the men and women who crowded about him to hear his words: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He would give them the means of finding rest and relief from every burden which limited and saddened their lives; for with his great knowledge of the law of God he could help them to rise above the material sense of life and its small affairs, to make every so-called yoke easy and every so-called burden light. But, for nineteen hundred years after Jesus spoke those words, men were taught to learn of Jesus through blind faith alone, and they sought to obtain the rest of which he spoke through material belief, through superstitious belief in religious observances, through husks of form and ceremony in which individual spiritual attainment was ofttimes forgotten in the effort to create organized sects and orders and associations, governing the religious activity of men in bulk. Until Christian Science came into the field of religious endeavour, bearing the torch of individual salvation by individual demonstration and individual perception of divine law, men had not realized that each one is responsible to God alone and that each has direct access to God, unimpeded by any intermediary, divine power being so vital a force in the experience of every man that it can be said, "In him we live, and move, and have our being."

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