Article August 7, 1915 Issue

Love's Atmosphere

EVA S. W. WILLIAMS

The absolute impartiality of what we term nature, in her gifts to men and in her total disregard of mortal beliefs, has always been very obvious. The rain falls and the sun shines on all alike; the air we breathe is given without discrimination to each and all; and the ocean recognizes no differences among men. There are conditions, however, avoidable and unavoidable, owing to which men have not profited in equal measure by nature's impartiality. Thus, the air surrounding a city set in a valley is not the fresh pure air that blows on the mountain top, and the light which penetrates to the interior of the homes of a smoke-filled district is not the clear and cloudless downpour of sunlight. Though in themselves these gifts are of universal bestowal, they have not been equally available to all.

There are other gifts which prior to Mrs. Eddy's discovery of Christian Science were always imagined to be bestowed upon individuals separately, namely, the means of cognizing our surroundings. How little we realized, before the teachings of Christian Science enabled us to do so, that there is an all-pervading atmosphere of Mind's ideas, an atmosphere upon which all may draw, and which is an unfailing and limitless source of supply! Yet it is an actual and ever-present fact that "we live, and move, and have our being" in the very midst of this supply, wholly spiritual, but expressing itself in mercy to mortals, in terms of so-called human sense faculties, namely, those of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. In the first line of one of the Christian Science hymns this all-embracing manifestation of compassionate intelligence is called the "atmosphere of love divine" (Hymnal, p. 144), and it includes everything good and pure and holy and true, everything of which true thought can conceive.

Mortals have made the great mistake of outlining what they believed to be material (though intangible) gifts and separating them in belief from what they considered spiritual ones. Thus the gifts of the Spirit, "love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance," were rightly regarded as spiritual, and as such offered to all men; but sight and hearing have been thought of as physical, and supposed to be given or withheld from certain individuals according to some scheme beyond our human comprehension.

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