Editorial November 30, 1912 Issue

"NEARER, MY GOD, TO THEE"

John B. Willis

THE heavens may have seemed brass in many a crucial hour, and yet normal people have never been able to think of God as inaccessible, and Christian Science is blessing all mankind in making His nearness the more apparent and intelligible. It teaches that God is a universal possession, an infinite ever-presence; that the prayer, "Nearer, my God, to Thee," is therefore divinely warranted, and that no failure of its fulfilment can find explanation in a divine partiality or reserve. Receptivity is and must ever be the secret of effective prayer. As Mrs. Eddy has said, "Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals" (Science and Health, p. 13), and it is no more thinkable that God should withhold His good from those who are truly willing to receive it than that the sun should withhold its light from its least encircling planet.

We learn, however, in Christian Science that approach to God is possible only by the way of illumined understanding; that false sense rather than lack of desire for good has separated us from Him, and that we must know our way into His presence. If one honors the God whom Christ Jesus revealed as infinite Life, he must regard Him as man's Life, and give up looking to aught else for life. This thought supports Christian Science's reiterated rebuke of the habit of looking to materia medica for the betterment and preservation of life. It denies and condemns the equally universal thought that life exists or can exist apart from God. False sense is forever seducing men with its fair insistence that life is in and of matter, and the professed Christian often seeks to excuse the illogic of this belief by declaring that God, Spirit, made the stuff with which he thus companions! Christian metaphysics denies the possibility of the association of Spirit and matter, and this is both the secret and the sanity of the philosophy of Christian Science.

With equal insistence Christian Science leads one to analyze his thought attitude toward God as infinite Truth. A love of truth which is ever ready to part with undemonstrated opinions, by no means characterizes the average Christian; on the contrary, while self-convinced of his loyalty to Truth, he is ever seeking to buttress an educated belief. Light defines the nature of God as love defines His activity, and we know that they who will not give light an open-window welcome are destined to dwell in darkness. This is the perfectly simple and absolutely inexorable philosophy of prayer as understood in Christian Science.

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