Article March 30, 1918 Issue

God Is Truth

JOHN B. WILLIS

On the ceiling of a chapel he decorated, Michelangelo has represented God the Father as a majestic man, dignified and beneficent beyond words, and to Christian Scientists one of the most suggestive features of his famous work is this, that in it he illustrates the immensely significant fact that in the innumerable chapels of individual consciousness the divine character is outlined very much after such a superhuman model who is yet subject to limitations which are utterly opposed to the universally accepted dogma that God is infinite, the All-in-all.

It would seem that no one who attributes the world order to an individual source, called God, could fail to appreciate the importance of the emphasis which Christian Science lays upon the necessity of gaining a right concept of the nature of this all-creative, all-governing Being. Mrs. Eddy's words, "The true idea of God gives the true understanding of Life and Love, robs the grave of victory, takes away all sin and the delusion that there are other minds, and destroys mortality" (Science and Health, p. 323), make it clear that she regarded right thought of God as the summum bonum. Surely nothing can be more fundamental, more vital, or more imperative, and it is probable that no other teaching of Christian Science is more profoundly and more helpfully influencing general religious thought than is this to-day.

That the concept of Deity which men have entertained should have borne the impress of their imperfect sense of the nature of personality, so that they were led to think and speak of God as a mighty king, seems not at all surprising, and yet it is apparent that at their best all the Scripture writers recognized the menace of this point of view. In moments when they were "caught up into paradise," as St. Paul describes one of his own experiences, they were always exalting the name (nature) of the Lord, were trying to instruct the people out of that anthropomorphism which has regarded the Supreme Being as other than infinite Spirit. Mrs. Eddy clearly discerned the existing need of the religious world in this respect. She saw the hopelessness of its spiritual advance so long as inconsistent and incongruous concepts of God remained regnant in human consciousness; and the heart of the gospel which she preached from the date of her discovery of the present, healing power of the truth Christ Jesus taught, might be said to be found in her oft repeated declaration that God is infinite Truth, Life, Love. By making use of the Scripturally authorized synonyms for God, she undertook to rectify and enlarge every thought of Him which would in any way impeach His integrity and thus fetter faith or discourage aspiration.

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