Article January 18, 1913 Issue

TRUTH UNVARYING

HELEN L. MOSS.

In Science and Health we read that "divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need" (p. 494). Once again the truth of our beloved Leader's statement has been demonstrated to me, and my heart is so full of thankfulness that it wells forth in this expression of gratitude and praise,—gratitude to her whose purity and love caused her to be the chosen messenger of divine Truth to a waiting world; and praise to God for the revelation of Himself to mankind in Christian Science. In an hour of darkness, struggling with a material sense of irreparable loss, through the passing on of one very dear, the Sentinel came, bringing me sweetest and truest comfort in an article which took away all sense of death's power to sever those who truly love God, good. Often has my hunger been satisfied by the spiritual food supplied through the columns of our periodicals, and I would fain add my crumb to the feast.

Before I studied Christian Science I was not grateful. When things went smoothly and pleasantly I took it all as a matter of course; and when they did not I was apt to worry and feel aggrieved. I worried greatly over all kinds of things, often fearing and anticipating troubles which never came. How thankful I am to have cast aside this unreal burden through some understanding of Love's omnipresence. Then, in the old thought there were many questions connected with religious faith which puzzled me sorely, and to which I could never get really satisfactory answers. Such one was the forgiveness of sins. While studying a recent Lesson-Sermon, which seemed specially to bear on the subject of repentance and forgiveness, I realized as never before how clear and simple these things become in the light of Christian Science. remembered how, when a member of another church, I had gone to a service and repeated in all sincerity the general confession, and partaken of the holy sacrament; but time after time I had come away feeling very doubtful whether my sins were really forgiven, whether I were really sorry enough to have earned God's pardon. Moreover, I was by no means sure that the next time temptation presented itself I would not again fall into sin. Then, too, it was often hard to know whether certain things were really sinful, when I saw others, less strictly brought up than myself, doing them as a matter of course.

Now these questions have assumed a very different aspect, viewed in the light of Christian Science, and I can see that it is the change in my concept of God which has cleared things up. When I thought of Him as a kind of glorified ruler, who bestowed or withheld pardon in an arbitrary manner, I never knew how I stood; but when I came to know Him as the divine Principle governing man and the universe, absolute and unchangeable good, I could always be sure that whatever did not measure up to the demands of Principle was sin, and that it was forgiven only when it was cast out of consciousness and the truth of being, the good, put in place. Thought traveled back to the time when the expression "Principle" as applied to God had puzzled me, and I remembered how the oft-cited parallel of mathematics made it clear to me how God could forgive sin and heal sickness while having no consciousness of either, and why divine Principle, Love, never forgives error until it is corrected.

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