Article July 31, 1920 Issue

The Ever Presence of God

ADELL FOY

To students of Christian Science, God's presence is becoming the truest, most real fact in life, bringing joy and peace, eliminating fear, sickness, and sin. Our whole concept of our heavenly Father is very different from the one formerly held by most of us, that He was a mysterious, faraway Being who sometimes intervened in human affairs and was remembered chiefly, it seemed, in sorrow or sickness, but was very slightly concerned in our everyday affairs. We took it for granted that we must go on with a sort of blind faith; that we were not supposed to know much about God; and as for man in His image and likeness—that surely was in the next world, not here. The mistake was in thinking that mortal man was the divine image and likeness; consequently that God was a magnified and glorified human being "in heaven." And where was heaven? It could not be here where sorrow and trouble are so evident. Yet the Bible, when studied in connection with "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," shows clearly that heaven is here and now to those who understand. In the Lord's Prayer the first line is, "Our Father which art in heaven," so evidently heaven is where God is. We admit that God is infinite; therefore, heaven must be ever present, the manifestation of God's presence. That He cannot be in any defined place or locality, now here and now there, is self-evident. Christ Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is within you," and we used to wonder where; for physicians and surgeons say that in all their study of the human body they have never found the "seat of the soul," that which to them stands for the supposed spiritual part of mankind. Where could the kingdom be but in spiritual understanding? What a man knows about God and man determines his life.

In the study of our daily Lesson-Sermons as outlined in The Christian Science Quarterly, the Bible is in constant use and is understood instead of being merely believed, and with great satisfaction we find it to be logical and consistent. We read in the first chapter of Genesis that God made every thing and that it was very good; and in the first chapter of John's gospel we read, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ... and and without him was not any thing made that was made." It is plain from this that God made all, and only good. Then what about that which is not good? It is only the seeming absence of good, and to understand this we must translate everything into mental terms. On page 269 of our textbook Mrs. Eddy says, "Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul." Great thinkers, from Plato to the present time, have argued that matter is not substantial, but not until Mrs. Eddy's revelation have we known what true substance is and learned that a man's whole existence is indeed "as he thinketh."

We all believe education is good and desirable, and we know that it is purely mental. We see the necessity for education in mathematics, physics, astronomy, law, and other branches. Why should there not be education in religion? After the Sunday school how few, comparatively, really have studied the Bible or really have known what their church creeds and doctrines mean. Jesus said that God is Spirit and that He must be worshiped "in spirit and in truth." These two words linked together show us that truth is spiritual. As our Leader shows us, we must be educated spiritually, and this is what Science and Health does. True religion is the most important study there is; we find it is really the whole of living, as it helps and guides us in every study, work, and experience, great and small. By it we find God ever present; we seek and find good; fear and evil are seen to be the negation, nothingness, which they really are, and we realize in greater measure that good is manifested in infinite variety. God's creation, as right idea, is unfolded and revealed in the "beauty of holiness"—wholeness; for it is plain that idea expresses the Mind which conceives it. Hence God is Mind, as Mrs. Eddy uses that word.

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