Editorial April 27, 1912 Issue

"GOD IS OUR REFUGE"

John B. Willis

The Scripture teaching that "God is our refuge and strength" is theoretically accepted by many who also think of Him as the creator of the physical universe and its laws. A sense of the divine immanence is frequently voiced which finds in "natural law" the expression of the unvarying activity of Him whose controlling presence is witnessed to as certainly in the circle of the dewdrop as in the circuit of the heavens; and not a few clerical critics condemn the Christian Science teaching that all real being is Spirit and its manifestations, and that matter and its laws are not modes of the divine manifestation, as heretical.

In considering this subject it is important for us to remember that He to whom we may go with full expectation of protection and safety must be just and compassionate in every aspect both of His nature and His activity. The law which expresses His effective will must be no less kind than is that will. The Scripture declares not only for the goodness of God, but that He is "righteous in all his ways;" He cannot do or be a party to anything which discredits His infinite perfection. The logic and necessity of this fact is the more manifest when in Christian Science we are led to think of God as infinite Truth and Love. We know that all of Truth's activities are true, and that Love is always loving. Speaking of this at-one-ment between God and His works, Mrs. Eddy has said that the divine attributes are "the eternal manifestations of the infinite divine Principle, Love" (Science and Health, p. 275); and this is altogether in keeping with the metaphysical proposition that there is and can be no unlikeness between the creator and the thing created, between the doer and his doing.

Now if this be true, those who say that so-called physical laws express the activity of an infinitely good being are called on to explain why these laws are not always our refuge. In the late dreadful tragedy of the sea, physical law contributed to the event from the falling of the snow at the head of the polar fjord, until, solidified into a mighty ice mass, it finally reached the coast, plunged into the sea, and floated directly athwart the course of the doomed vessel. So too physical forces impelled the monster ship to an impact which resulted, humanly speaking, in an unspeakable catastrophe. Were the material forces which thus had to do with scenes from which human sense turns away in shuddering faintness, the expression of the activity of Him who is "righteous in all his ways"? Many ministers are thus averring today, while others resent the suggestion as a disgrace to Deity, and yet others can only cry out in Job-like agony and weariness of thought.

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