Article January 4, 1913 Issue

ALONE WITH GOD

MARY WHEELER.

To be alone with God is to have no sense of anything apart from Him. It is to have no belief in anything outside His allness. It is to acknowledge no reality in anything which contradicts His nature. It is to have no faith in matter, no fear of evil, no love of sin, no sense of self. It is to entertain no thought that He could not think, to listen to no prompting that could not come from Him.

Mark tells us that Jesus, "rising up a great while before day, ... departed into a solitary place, and there prayed." So, in the night of temptation, sorrow, or pain, should the weary heart rise up, even while yet there seems no ray of light, and depart into that consciousness where only good is, and there hold communion with God. Alone with infinite good, evil has no presence. Under the heaven of Love divine, sorrow cannot abide. Going out from the lying sense of life in the body, pain dies for want of cherishing. Clinging fast to old visions of the beauty of holiness, even while groping blindly among the shadows of self-will and self-love, at length across the night of error dawn the morning beams of Truth (see Science and Health, Pref., p. vii), and presently the up-hill road that seemed so rough becomes the mount of transfiguration. Then, indeed, would the awefilled heart build tabernacles to inflooding revelations! For then is the stern righteousness of Sinai known as one with the very Principle of life; then in the uplifted realization of the nothingness of sense is recognized the prophecy of that restoration of all things in their spiritual reality which shall satisfy every desire.

To live alone with God is to be in the world and yet not of it. It is to know loneliness, it may be, in human relationships, but it is to be companioned by all right ideas; it is to be not alone, because at one with those "highest ideas [which] are the sons and daughters of God" (Science and Health, p. 503). To live alone with God is to be at peace with self, because it is to find one's true self in Him whose peace mortality cannot give nor take away. To live alone with God is to have ears to hear and heart to understand that symphonic benediction which from the summit of the Christ-mind sounded its basic note in the pregnant words, "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." To live alone with God is finally to attain some measure of that exaltation whence we, in reverent humility, may echo the sublime declaration: "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me."

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