Editorial May 17, 1919 Issue

The Living God

William D. McCrackan

Principle is the living God. Real life is continuous, without break or interval of lifelessness. There is never any cessation of vitality or vigor in the living God whom Christian Science teaches mankind to love and worship. He neither slumbers nor sleeps, nor sows the discords which mortals call sin and sickness. He never stops being Life and never transmits to His children aught which can block their unbroken progress. Life does not establish a dead line beyond which men and nations are forbidden to move. The supposed god of dead ceremonies has never really lived; and now let the dead bury their dead without mourning or regrets, "unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown." Mrs. Eddy writes in "Unity of Good" (p. 38), "It is unchristian to believe in the transition called material death, since matter has no life, and such misbelief must enthrone another power, an imaginary life, above the living and true God."

The real man is the living effect of the living God. The enlightened mortal cries out with the psalmist for the "water of life," "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God;" and, "My heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God." Jesus' words to the Samaritan woman at the well explained for all time the nature of the life-giving waters: "If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.... Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life."

To follow the living God calls for a living sacrifice, even the putting away of the belief that life is in matter, intelligence in pain, or sensation in material nerve. The new and living way of Spirit buries the works of darkness, the vanities of personal sense, the fears of the sick, the fruits of resentment and revenge, and the attempted reversals proceeding from the argument that evil is real. The onward sweep of the living way leads to the city of the living God, resplendent in glory, girt with jeweled walls and fair gates. Mrs. Eddy through her "Key to the Scriptures" has provided sure entrance to this city for the obedient and grateful. Thither is the gathering of the nations; there the law of Love is triumphantly vindicated in the government of righteous peace, the proof of divine Science is established by a cloud of living witnesses.

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