Article January 17, 1920 Issue

"Ye shall find rest"

LAURA DUNBAR HAGARTY

The bringing of comfort beyond the power of human bestowal is the fulfillment in Christian Science of the promise, "Ye shall find rest unto your soul." When Jesus gave this promise, found in the eleventh chapter of Matthew, he prefaced it with the invitation, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest." Explicit directions followed that invitation in these words: "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart;" and then came the culminating promise, followed by the encouraging assurance, "For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." To every form of weariness the promise speaks to-day with the same certainty of fulfillment which Jesus originally gave it. The case of deferred healing; the case of unhappy or discord; the case of discouraged endeavor to apprehend the truth sufficiently to form a working basis,—to all these the promise rings out with the freshness and freedom from doubt with which it was originally endowed.

Christian Science has reinvested these words of the Master with the healing power understood by their author. Instead of riveting attention upon weariness, pain, or sorrow, Christian Science points thought to God and His idea, the source of all rest and joy. Thus released from the grasp of the flesh, thought ascends to the spiritual, where peace forever reigns. When it becomes anchored in God, Spirit, it is at rest, because the mental states which make for disturbance have been controlled or destroyed. Worry, irritation, faultfinding, envy, covetousness, uncurbed ambition, and kindred qualities in pronounced form, finally wear down their entertainer to the point of exhaustion. Such qualities are corrected by the understanding that God is infinite good, infinite Love, and that God's idea, man, is the same in essence as the Mind that forms him. Herein is ineffable rest.

As in every other point, here also Christian Science is in entire accord with the Scriptures. When Christ Jesus said, "Come unto me," he unquestionably meant that in coming to him we should find rest in spiritual understanding. The condition, therefore, upon which Jesus based the promise of rest is that the seeker accept spiritual reality and thereby renounce the material view of all things. The yoke which he offered with confidence to the heavy-laden must be spiritual; for he immediately associated it with meekness and lowliness of heart. Elsewhere he disposed of the material view of things with unmistakable finality thus: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing."

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