Article July 13, 1912 Issue

IS GOD SILENT?

ROBERT NALL.

The student of Christian Science has not long been engaged in what becomes to him his life's work before he discovers to his surprise that his concept of God has undergone a remarkable change. It is one that brings a thrill of joy when first experienced, because the sense of separation from God begins to fade and the divine presence is known as a deeply conscious reality. The thought of the infinite distance of God "in heaven" may have been accompanied by perplexity as to why God is silent. "Why does not God speak audibly to us as He did to men in olden times?" How often this has been asked in querulous tones, as if God had hidden Himself and refused to acknowledge His children today. The thought is a burden not only to many who are yet in bonds of materiality, but even to many good Christians who claim to have found spiritual light and the way of life eternal.

The Christian Scientist knows by painful wanderings and waywardness how reluctantly mortal thought abandons its foundations of error, still wanting to ascribe human characteristics to the Almighty and persisting in mentally delineating Him in the likeness of man. It has even been argued at great length that God has really been silent for nineteen centuries, ever since the ascension of Jesus, but that we are on the eve of a revival of those wonderful days when He spoke to men in tones that could be heard, as He did to Abraham and Samuel and David and other of His servants of whom we read in the Old Testament. It is quite true, as Peter declared in the early days of the Christian era, that God did speak "by the mouth of all his prophets," but it is just as true that He has never ceased to speak. Not only does the Christian Science student soon come to known by the best of all proofs that God is always near as Life and Love and Truth, but that He hears and answers prayer.

This question of the divine voice is sometimes mixed up with that of God's immanence and transcendence, about which the Christian world is hopelessly confused. The Christian Scientist, having found the truth, which is always the spiritual mean and not human extremes, has ceased to puzzle himself over these difficulties. He knows that the spiritual man—the man of God's creation—is always with God, and can always hear His voice. There is a spiritual ear which can hear that of which mortal sense has no knowledge. The untutored ear is not attuned to divine things, and is dull of hearing. Mortal thought has a tendency to run into extremes and into utter fallacies. It says that because God does not "speak," therefore we cannot hear His voice; moreover, it begins to doubt whether God hears, and therefore it discourages prayer. How many poor souls have lamented because error has misled them into the belief that God either cannot or will not hear them, despite the fact that they have made abundance of material sacrifices and have pleaded and besought in tears for weeks and months. Oh, the pity of it! The writer remembers hearing good old George Muller of Bristol say that he had been praying for one special thing for forty years and yet God had not heard him. This, too, from a man whose prayers had been ofttimes wonderfully answered.

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