Some years ago, when walking with a cousin down the main street of our village, we saw two ragged little children standing on tiptoe, gazing longingly into the window of a small jeweler's shop. Seeing that the trinkets which they were exclaiming over were marked fourpence and sixpence, my companion bent down to the children with sympathetic impulse, and said: "Would you like to have some of those bracelets? I'll give you both one if you like." They looked up at her with saucy derision, and responded with wise incredulity. The next minute, however, she had vanished into the shop, and ere they had realized her purpose, she slipped a shining ring of silver round each little wrist. "They are yours," I heard her say; "yours to keep." Then we walked on, while the children moved away, apparently too dazed to be quite sure of what had happened.

Since that time the incident has often come back to mind and assumed more metaphysical interpretations; for how often do we grown-up children, ragged and poor enough in our meager experiences of health and happiness, stand in the streets of this mortal pilgrimage and gaze at some faint concept of good, finding it too dazzling to believe that it could ever become our own possession. Mortals, so wise in their expectation of poverty and sickness and desolation, mentally turn away with a questioning shrug when the hint of a loving creator, a beautiful life, and abundant provision for their needs, is presented for their acceptance, so far removed from such blessedness has been their past experience. Yet this eternal good and these inexhaustible riches are here for us all; it is God's good pleasure that we should have them, and our present concept of good things is as a child's toy compared with the treasures of Spirit, which, St. Paul tells us, "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man" to conceive, but which he assures us are prepared for us by our Father-Mother God.

It is recorded in the fifth chapter of St. John that Jesus once saw by the pool of Bethesda an impotent man, who for thirty-eight years had looked on, while many of his fellow beings received some measure of relief from suffering, without being able to get any himself. Going to him, Jesus asked the startling question, "Wilt thou be made whole?" and the man replied (we can imagine with what dull despair), "Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me." Then the miracle, to mortal sense, took place. Jesus, by spiritual power alone, healed him instantaneously, and he "took up his bed, and walked."

Today the Christ-idea again comes to us in the midst of our poverty and our problems, revealed to us with renewed power through divine Science, and asks us severally, "Wilt thou be made whole?" Although we may outwardly assent to such a glorious possibility, how often do we whisper within, "I do not think it possible." That we fail to get quicker answers to our prayers is, as often as not, because the very idea of receiving so much good simply takes our breath away at the outset, and the feeling that such and such an occurrence would be "too good to be true," occupies a larger place in our convictions than the knowledge that because good is good, therefore it is true. We are tempted to think that God does not really mean us to have the blessing, and that some untoward event will circumvent our expectations of joy. Yet our Master said: "What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?"

Nothing but our own fears and unbelief shuts us out from perfect health,—these, and the more subtle form which unbelief assumes with religious-minded people, that in some mysterious way it would not be right for us to be healthy and happy, that misfortune and deprivation are going to teach us something, and we shall find out by these means how selfish and sinful we are and perhaps start to improve our characters. That may be one way of meeting life's experiences, but back of it is still the demon of unbelief in good. To this some person may say, "Yes, but then how do you account for all the saintly people who have had the most sublime faith and trust in God's promises, and yet have had so few of their earthly hopes realized?"

Christian Science does not put such an inquirer off with the pious answer, "Well, human desires are all delusion anyway, and it is much better they never should be realized." Just as a human father would not take away his baby's pink balloon in order to give him a taste for astronomy, so God, as we understand Him now, does not lead one of us to a higher concept of His glory by the arbitrary and negative process of dispossessing us of such scant ideals as we already cherish. Rather will it be found that even the most trustful, with the most beautiful faith in God's goodness, have not persistently expected unlimited unadulterated good to flow into their lives in answer to prayer, but they have generally at crucial points given their faith an inverted twist, and have made a virtue of being content without the answer, or have relegated the answer to some time way off in the future, subconsciously feeling that the good they prayed for was still "too good to be true."

Then some one exclaims, "Yes, but I do believe in God; I believe in Christian Science. I have been expecting good, but the more I try, the more troubles I get; things seem to grow worse and worse." The right thing to do is simply to go on trying. Even if mortal experience does turn out to be, as so many say, "one thing after another," the time comes when the assertion of the truth, the persistent affirming of the presence and power of Love, breaks through the sense of trouble, however tremendous it may seem, and we realize that God is God, that He is infinite in power, and reigns, and thus we are delivered.

Piercing the veil of mortal sense, Christian Science has revealed anew the great facts of being,—that God is good, that man is His image and likeness, and therefore reflects infinite good, here and now; and every desire for health, wealth, happiness, home, friends, education, art, beauty, and the fulness of love, which has ever gone forth from the hungering heart of humanity, has already been given to man as God's image, from everlasting to everlasting, and is His "world without end."

A short time ago, a little girl who had been going to a Christian Science Sunday school, when she heard that a little playmate could not come to her party because she was in bed with a cold, exclaimed, "Ill in bed! Why, hasn't she been told that God loves her?" We older folk could well take that simple rebuke in the matter of weightier questions, and say, "Yes, sweet child, we have all been told, told for exactly nineteen hundred and fourteen years, that God loves us, but we have not adequately believed it; we have not really understood it; we have not applied it to our special affairs, otherwise we should assuredly have received the good we long for."

And for those who are patiently working, watching, praying, who are earnestly striving to turn away from the world as they see it, to the spiritual and perfect world as God knows it, the message is, "Faint not," for they will soon be able to rejoice in the words of that most human and divine psalm: "When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: ... They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him."