Article April 26, 1913 Issue

OMNIPOTENT GOOD

LAURA GERAHTY.

Many years ago, in answer to the argument that it was God's will that her mother should suffer, a child retorted, "I don't see how you can love God, if you think He likes to make you miserable." That little heart was ready to reflect the love that it was always absorbing from its surroundings, and it instinctively rebelled against the quiet, almost unspoken teaching of its mother, that God, whom she believed to be Love, was ready to do less. The little one naturally resented such a thought, but the mother through years of contact with materiality nursed and nourished it, and suffered correspondingly in brave silence, believing it was the will of God that she should do so.

This pathetic situation is encountered very frequently, and as yet there are relatively few Christian people who perceive its incongruity and wrong; but as their number steadily increases year by year, the old concept of God is surely passing away. A few years ago, that child, grown older, reached out greedily and gratefully for the new and welcome truth that sin and suffering, wrong desire and its punishment, are not of God, and hence that they have no abiding-place in God's perfect creation, where, as we are told, there shall be no more pain, "and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." She drew a deep breath of satisfaction when she could unreservedly acquit God of all the blame which had held no insignificant place in her simple and wavering beliefs; and there grew a great longing to give to God, even at the eleventh hour, some of the love and gratitude which those same beliefs of ignorance and mistaken tuition had so long made her withhold.

Of the many burdens from which Christian Science has relieved its students, this one, that God wills us to suffer, though perhaps smaller than that of vice, has been, nevertheless, a very large factor in the mass of errors which have stood in our way on the upward path to spiritual truth. There is a constant desire to get rid of the load of suffering, and any method is eagerly grasped for the sake of the result to be obtained. But are we as ready to use every argument against our brother's failing or misdemeanors? Surely not. There is a subtle argument almost unconsciously presented within, that it is not so serious or deadly that we must necessarily interfere. The same subtlety works with our attitude to God. We say we have loved our brother, and we say we have loved God, but we have not loved either the one or the other sufficiently well to separate them wholly from all belief in error.

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