Article August 16, 1919 Issue

Proving Our Gratitude

HENRY H. LINDSEY

What is most promising when the burden of fear or disease has been lifted for the first time through the ministrations of Christian Science, is that the person who has been healed is usually interested in learning how he was cured. It may have been that he believed he would be entirely happy if he could only be delivered from physical suffering; and now he finds that this has faded into insignificance before the desire to be better and to understand more about the divine Principle that has healed him. He is inspired to try to be more worthy of the wonderful love of God which has been made manifest to him through his healing, and for which he can give no adequate expression of gratitude in words.

Then he begins to learn the way in which the goodness of God had delivered him. How reassuringly and helpfully Mrs. Eddy states the nature of divine law on page 384 of Science and Health, where she says: "We should relieve our minds from the depressing though that we have transgressed a material law and must of necessity pay the penalty. Let us reassure ourselves with the law of Love. God never punishes man for doing right, for honest labor, or for deeds of kindness, though they expose him to fatigue, cold, heat, contagion." What an awakening to learn that atmosphere, toil, so-called health laws, or contagion have no power to harm us so long as we obey the law of God! How fearlessly and joyously we can face the storm and do all that is required of us, through reliance on the infinite goodness of His tender, loving care!

What seems most marvelous about all this, however, is that although one may be in the same environment, yet everything appears different. The sordid and disagreeable aspects of life have begun disappear, and in place of them is a greater measure of happiness; the dread of loss, of failure, and of disease has vanished as the recognition has come that Love guards every idea, and that "it is impossible that man should lose aught that is real, when God is all and eternally his" (Science and Health, p. 302). Yet something has radically changed to bring about this better view, and the realization dawns that as the true nature of God as good has been realized, the belief that evil has any place in His creation has disappeared, and with it all its self-constituted discordant conditions. God had not given evil any power to govern His man and to make him sick or discordant, and men need only to find the truth about God's creation, and live in accord with it, to be delivered from evil and all its manifestations.

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