Article April 12, 1913 Issue

NOW

FLORENCE E. B. DONALDSON.

In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy, after quoting Jesus' words, "The kingdom of God is within you," brings home to the reader the wonderful truth that this spiritual consciousness of omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent good is "a present possibility" (pp. 573, 574). There is, perhaps, nothing more difficult for the student of Christian Science to grasp than this, since the human mind has looked so continually to the future for the assurance of surcease from pain, discord, and sorrow, and to death as a means of release from weariness or affliction, and has regarded it as being the portal through which all must pass before either heaven or immortality could be gained.

Pope crystallized this though of a future and therefore logically unattainable blessedness, in his well-known line, "Man never is, but always to be blest." This mortal mind belief has largely governed humanity, insomuch that fear, doubt, anxiety, and kindred errors have grown apace in human consciousness. Every attempt to go forward, and to lay hold of the good desired and sought after, has shown the goal still farther away, still out of reach in that far-off future which, like tomorrow, never comes. It is this material view of life and its conditions which, like the mirage of the desert, has appeared to mankind as all that is desirable and necessary to satisfy human craving and human need, but which proves ever elusive, and ever promises but never fulfils. It lures us to believe, through the testimony of the material senses, that death stands in the pathway to life eternal, instead perfection learning through spiritual discernment that the well of life-giving water is ever at hand, even in the wilderness of human hopes and fears.

Christian Science, with its recovered message of peace on earth, declares in unmistakable terms that now is the time for discord of every kind to be overcome by truth. Mrs. Eddy has taught us that "the true sense of being and its eternal perfection should appear now, even as it will hereafter" (Science and Health, p. 550). It is to this end that, as Christian Scientists, we are called upon to work daily and hourly; to know for ourselves and others that there is only one Ego, one Mind, and that man in His image and likeness reflects this Mind; that although mortal mind claims to create its own physical conditions, it is in reality no mind, has no entity, and cannot deprive man of his inalienable rights, the inheritance of good, of perfect harmony. It is our to know that we cannot suffer for doing what it is our duty to do, since omnipotence preserves us from all evil, that we are safe and well eternally, under all circumstances, under all conditions, when dwelling under the law of Love, as we needs must, and from which nothing and no one can separate us. As some one has said,—

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