Article August 19, 1916 Issue

Sorrow Overcome

LESTER B. MC COUN

IN Science and Health (p. 304) our Leader has said: "This is the doctrine of Christian Science: that divine Love cannot be deprived of its manifestation, or object; that joy cannot be turned into sorrow, for sorrow is not the master of joy; that good can never produce evil; that matter can never produce mind nor life result in death." This statement, emanating from one whose purity of thought and whose love for God and humanity were sufficient to give her work the vitalizing impulse and responsiveness so necessary to those who realize divine aid alone to be their recourse, is as a beacon-light in times of sorrow.

Like any other inharmony, grief is based on ignorance of God, on the supposition that in some instances divine Love either is not operative or else is effective in a different degree than in other situations. Only sense-testimony supports the contention that there is an unknown influence existing in opposition to God which can check legitimate endeavor, and only ignorance supports the contention that God, the Life of the universe and man, has decreed that life is an undefined something to be projected or withdrawn according to the changing view of the creator. The seeming helplessness engendered by such admissions is corrected by the understanding, established through the study of Christian Science, of the universal activity and supremacy of divine Love as unchanging Principle, the infinite Life.

In Christian Science, individual achievement of good is seen to be the manifestation of the divine nature. What is recalled, therefore, as the love and loyalty of those whose companionship we once enjoyed, is more than memory, it is the evidence of the immortality of good,—and can we doubt the unfailing purpose of God to care for His own? God's idea has not changed. Immortality is not a vague, visionary belief, too sublime and vast to be comprehended, relating to time and chance and to be experienced in a manner yet unknown. Immortality includes the complete and ever-present expression of God's allness, the realization of and full dependence on self-sustaining omnipotence. Grief cannot withstand the joy which rises in a heartfelt prayer of gratitude to God for the light which reveals His tender love and care for those removed from our sight.

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