Article April 5, 1919 Issue

Heaven's Formidable Favors

MABEL K. DIXON

A mid the sounds of rejoicing over the announcement of the dawn of peace upon a war-swept world this message of deep import comes to us in the words of our Leader: "Heaven's favors are formidable: they are calls to higher duties, not discharge from care" (Christian Healing, p. 1). The heavenly favors of liberty, justice, and peace which are being bestowed upon a waiting world, hold within them the demand for the unconditional surrender of the human ways and means that have proved so unavailing in the past, and the acceptance of the requirements of divine Principle, which places in God's hands the interests of individuals and nations, to be worked out through the laws of Love, operating through divine impulsion to harmonious consummation. This will bring a peace such as the world can neither give nor take away. This does not mean release from care, but calls us to a higher sense of responsibility—our response to Truth's demands; for, as Mrs, Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 450), "the Christian Scientist has enlisted to lessen evil, disease, and death."

In the readjustment of the temporal relationship of nations, only God-governed thinking can rightly adjust for the good of all. We are beholding the strong cords of Truth, of justice, yea, even of Love, driving from the consciousness of men greed, hate, injustice, brutality, and vengeance,—all the qualities that go to make up "man's inhumanity to man,"—and preparing humanity to receive the healing truth which regenerates. Those who refuse to understand the language of Truth and Love must have spoken to them the language they can understand, until they are willing to learn the new tongue of Spirit. The "Thou shalt nots" of the Commandments come before the Beatitudes or blessings. In time the lesson is learned that divine Love never deprives anyone of anything but error. In the healing of the scars left by the military phase of the war through which we have passed, only the unselfed, Christlike touch can avail. From a human point of view it would indeed be a burden through all the thankless years to try to save humanity from itself, but the bidding of divine Love is, in the words of one of our hymns (Hymnal, p. 135),

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