Article April 13, 1918 Issue

"It shall not come nigh thee"

ADELE HULL KELLOGG

"Oh , how I love God!" Such was the involuntary outcry of a woman who had just passed unscathed through one of the greatest calamities of modern times. The rumbling earthquake of Christmas night, 1917, had turned more than a hundred thousand people into the streets homeless, and had left many others among the ruins. Guatemala City had fallen! The warning shock came at eleven o'clock at night and inside half an hour the rich capital of the Republic of Guatemala lay in ruins.

In June we had returned to this beautiful southland. In August, the first Christian Science services were begun in our home with from five to eleven persons in attendance. A wonderful healing that had previously taken place awakened much interest in the truths of Christian Science and brought inquirers. Other healings followed, and soon over a dozen people were earnestly studying the literature so kindly sent by the publication committee, and reading the Monitor, besides two copies of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" sent by a student's association. Our second reader provided copies of the Quarterly, and daily we were rising through faithful study out of the stupefying beliefs of materiality into the consciousness of spiritual reality that means deliverance from captive sense.

About two months after our services had started there began to sound in my consciousness the words of the seventh verse of the ninety-first psalm: "A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee." At first I believed this reiteration to be merely an echo of thought, but I finally came to accept it as a promise of entire protection,—from what I could not even surmise. Three months passed with these words of promise beating a rhythmic accompaniment to my steps. Thought rose on wings of faith until the entire consciousness was flooded with the understanding that God alone has presence and power. With this all-pervading sense of the ever presence and the allness of God and the consequent nothingness of evil, one who was crippled, suddenly stood free, literally leaping, and praising God. A surgeon of much repute had just pronounced it necessary to cut open the foot and again break and scrape the bone, but Christian Science spoke the "Peace, be still" and ushered into the waiting consciousness the redemptive truth that man is never at the mercy of so-called material laws.

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