Article August 21, 1915 Issue

Man's Heritage of Joy

LOUISE KNIGHT WHEATLEY

The consciousness of the Christian Scientist is like some sweet, still garden, wherein each day is unfolding new blossoms of thought, nourished by the dews of faith, refreshed by the winds of hope, and quickened into life and beauty by the warm sunshine of love. It is a place of perpetual springtime. As the world awakens each year from its long winter's sleep, so do mortals, too long asleep in material beliefs, awaken sooner or later under the transforming touch of Truth to find themselves in a new world of loveliness, the "new heaven" and the "new earth" of John's prophetic vision. The activity which unlocks the frozen shallows of the brooks, which flings green garlands on every bough and coaxes the anemone to uncurl its shy petals in the sunshine, is but a type of that spiritual activity which makes "the wilderness and the solitary place" of some starving human consciousness to bud and "blossom as the rose."

Mrs. Eddy asks, "Who that has felt the loss of human peace has not gained stronger desires for spiritual joy?" Then she adds, "The pains of sense quickly inform us that the pleasures of sense are mortal and that joy is spiritual" (Science and Health, p. 265). Joy, then, being spiritual, is but a part of man's eternal heritage. God's obedient idea has a right to be happy, because it is ever knowing and doing the Father's will. It is just as natural for man to be happy as it is for a bird to sing. Joy is a spiritual possession, and it necessarily follows that it is impartially and universally bestowed,—an ever present fact, as changeless and eternal as the Mind from which it emanates.

But what says mortal mind to all this? It flatly contradicts it, of course, just as it attempts to contradict and reverse everything that is true. It says that joy is far from being a universal possession, but is instead some rare gift allotted to a favored few. It says that joy is not the normal state of man, but the abnormal. It insists that man is naturally "of few days, and full of trouble." Job once believed this, but it was before he had learned to differentiate between frail humanity and the perfect man of God's creating. Popular opinion on this subject has not greatly changed since that day when beggared self-righteousness, shorn of all it held most dear, sat in dust and ashes, listening to the false sympathy of false friends.

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