Editorial August 17, 1918 Issue

"Comfort ye my people"

William D. McCrackan

Divine Science is the Comforter. God's people are constantly comforting others, and should comfort each other. They are amply provided with divine ideas which produce this spiritual comforting. No others can understand as well as those enlightened by Christian Science that man in reality has every reason to rejoice now and to look forward to an uninterrupted reign of happiness in the future. God is the power of real happiness and is infinitely good. He is Mind, and this Mind operates through law, His own law, which means health and freedom to all His creatures. What can be more comforting than the scientific assurance that evil has no power, no mind, no law, and no influence on health and freedom; that sense testimony is a mere seeming and nothing more, having no substantiality and no permanence? On page 30 of "No and Yes" Mrs. Eddy says, "God's law is in three words, 'I am All.' "

This gospel going forth into a world distraught stills the fears of mankind and neutralizes the hypnotic suggestions which would enslave the world. All is well within the radius of right thinking. Mental manipulations seek points of least resistance, but when the Comforter bars every door, the spoiler must remain outside. Christian Science is universal in its application. Its compassionate response is to all who are heavy-laden, who suffer through sin and sickness, who are disappointed by failure or stunned by the incredible outbreaks of evil to which the world war has given rise. Fear is discomfort, but the love of God is spiritual comfort. On page 127 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" Mrs. Eddy writes, "The forts of Christian Science, garrisoned by God's chosen ones, can never surrender."

Never in times ancient or modern have extremes been as conspicuous as in this hour. Christian Science provides safety, the spiritual comforts of home, the beauty of holiness, the quietness of spiritual peace, and the tender care of the Good Shepherd; but outside its garrisons all is doubt and disaster, and subject to presentiments of worse conditions yet to come. At this very moment Christian Science, like Isaiah of old, cries, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God." This is the gospel to which Christ Jesus referred when he declared to his disciples, "I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you;" it is the Christ, Truth, which Jesus taught would come to them in a greater measure than ever after he had left them, and would be their Comforter. Had Jesus' true teachings survived the three centuries after his ascension they might have come down to our own age unbroken by scholastic theology and would not have been frittered away by the sterile debates of schoolmen mistaking the letter and forgetting the spirit. A noble woman, Mary Baker Eddy, has rescued Jesus' teachings from oblivion, founded Christian Science upon the rock, carried forward the standard of Truth under which her faithful followers are finding comfort from the barbarities and extremes of present day evil.

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