Article November 9, 1912 Issue

"MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION."

FLORENCE E. B. DONALDSON.

From the first moment that Christian Science comes into our lives, we necessarily begin to serve God in the dawn of a new understanding. In doing so we find that this service to our Maker is greatly to be desired above every other, being, as St. Paul describes it, in his second epistle to the Corinthians, the "ministry of reconciliation." Christian Science throws a wonderful light on the meaning of these words. Mrs. Eddy writes: "The atonement of Christ reconciles man to God, not God to man; for the divine Principle of Christ is God, and how can God propitiate Himself? ... Love and Truth are not at war with God's image and likeness" (Science and Health, p. 19).

These lines lift our thought to a higher comprehension of man's relation to God. Many a familiar Scriptural phrase comes home to us with a new significance, and words which had seemed to have no special message for us before, are anon shining in their own light. We may be very honest and very sincere in our striving after good, but we travel a long way, and often become wearied with fruitless toil, before we even begin to realize that we cannot take our material beliefs with us. One by one we learn to drop them on the road; by slow degrees, willingly it may be, or perforce at the compelling touch of Truth. Following the footsteps of the Master, we would enter the sanctuary of Spirit, and well for us when we hear the voice of Truth. Thus to hear is necessarily to obey. However brief the moment of communion with Spirit, in it we have seen much. The task before us may seem utterly beyond our powers, but we have been strengthened and encouraged to perform it.

When first seeking the way in Christian Science, it is seldom indeed that the would-be worker in the realm of the real understands that all the work he is called upon to do must first be done in his own consciousness. He has nothing to do with the problems of others in the way he has hitherto believed. He learns in Christian Science that God is All-in-all, and as soon as we give up our condemning contemplation of the error which seems to be in, all around, and about us, we are making good progress in the task which God demands of each one of us, namely, to clear out of our own individual consciousness every thought that is unlike Love, the divine Principle of our being. However hopeless the task may seem to be at first, and our preliminary glance within anything but encouraging, we have nevertheless been aroused to a sense of the great need. In proportion to our honesty and our sincerity, we will go straight for the first unlovely thought which is uncovered to us, and with earnest endeavor and resolute persistence strive to uproot and eject it, however strong a hold it may seem to have.

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