The Lord Is at Hand

William D. McCrackan

The belief in a distant God lends color to skepticism. The scoffer may well say that he needs immediate help and cannot wait for a god who has to travel to his destination. When Elijah confounded the priests of Baal he taunted them with entertaining this very belief in a distant god. "Cry aloud," he mocked, "for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked." The sick and sorrowing cry out for a Lord who is at hand, but they cannot find Him in the theologies which claimed to rule before the present world war, and have now been weighed and found wanting. These outworn doctrines and dogmas attempted to circumscribe the infinite. The soldiers and sailors at the front and their families behind the lines have learned through suffering that no reliance can be placed upon a God limited by human attributes. In the hour of peril the superhuman and everywhere present power of the Supreme Being alone availeth, the one and only God explained by Christian Science.

If the theological theories of the past, the theo-sophistries which permitted the world war to brew and burst upon defenseless nations wish to perpetuate themselves, the burden of proof lies upon them to show cause why they should be permitted to live. The false concepts of God which they taught produced the inevitable fruits of error. They alienated the real thinker or terrorized the populace. They reversed Scriptural promises, turned rose gardens into deserts, robbed childhood of its trust in good, womanhood of its rights, and manhood of its courage. Then when the inevitable self-destruction of evil led to an explosion, these fatal misconceptions would have forced the world to face hypnotism and black art without God and without hope.

But Christian Science, which since 1866 had been present in human consciousness, had by the year 1914 become a living power circling the earth. It stayed the hand of this would-be world conquest, uncovered the hidden springs of occultism, corrected debased theology, and opened the way of salvation to the remnant of Israel. In the year 1918 the Lord is widely known to be at hand, not as the anthropomorphic person of an outlived theology, but as omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient Mind, Spirit, Love. The distressed and disheartened are everywhere learning that God is never "in a journey" but here, instantly available to turn aside the shot, to render harmless the explosion, blow away the poison gas, break the shock, heal the wound, cleanse mind and body, fill the void of separation with the joy of present consciousness. This explanation of God responds to reason and logic, is understood by the receptive thought, feeds the hungering heart, satisfies the affections.

To materia medica, scholastic theology, necromancy, and other etceteras of material belief, Christian Science declares in the words of Paul to the Romans, "The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light." With the dawn of spiritual light comes peace with victory, not the result of compromise or condonation, but of scientific forgiveness, which Christian Science shows to be the destruction of evil. On page 121 of Miscellany we read, "This peace is spiritual; never selfish, stony, nor stormy, but generous, reliable, helpful, and always at hand."

The true Lord is always at hand. His kingdom is at hand, His grace, His love. The day of salvation is at hand, of resurrection and ascension. Health, happiness, heaven, are at hand. Therefore Christian Scientists raise their hymns of gratitude on high. In Daniel's vision he saw "one like the Son of man ... And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed." Mrs. Eddy writes on page 174 of Science and Health: "The footsteps of thought, rising above material standpoints, are slow, and portend a longnight to the traveller; but the angels of His presence—the spiritual intuitions that tell us when 'the night is far spent, the day is at hand'—are our guardians in the gloom. Whoever opens the way in Christian Science is a pilgrim and stranger, marking out the path for generations yet unborn."

William D. McCrackan.

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