Editorial February 12, 1921 Issue

The Reassurance of Divine Love

Gustavus S. Paine

In trusting Principle, as revealed through Christian Science, for help and healing, a man's encouragement lies in the immanence of good. There is neither reason nor room for discouragement when one knows that the divine Mind is the source of all courage, is actually present, and is, in fact, the consciousness in which the real man always lives. Infinite Mind is not something to be gained by the only man whom God knows. The image and likeness of God already manifests this true Mind. Illusory mortality, moreover, can gain good only by vanishing in the presence of it. Such a statement is a paradox, a contradiction of terms. Every sense of limitation that gives way to the illimitable is the subsiding of just so much mortality in the demonstration of man's immortality. It is, thus, continuously encouraging to know where man's confidence is.

The certainty of Mind, or Life, as omnipresent is confidence in God. To be sure that immortal Life, or the causative Principle of being, is indestructible now is to have God's eternal guarantee of living. This assurance does not come about through any inductive examination of material phenomena, nor through mere human intuition as explained by psychology. The basic fact of consciousness, irrespective of material sense testimony, is the adequate reason for immortality. Because consciousness really exists now, it always has existed and always must exist; for if it included any element of destruction, it would not have complete existence even now. The more one considers this truth, the more is one satisfied with it as a basis for demonstration.

Many systems of human philosophy have puzzled over the fact of consciousness in one way or another. By this term, however, most such systems have meant the utterly hypothetical mortal mind, with its beliefs, and not the true, divine Mind and its idea. As Mrs. Eddy says, moreover, on page 116 of Science and Health, "They never crown the power of Mind as the Messiah, nor do they carry the day against physical enemies,—even to the extinction of all belief in matter, evil, disease, and death,—nor insist upon the fact that God is all, therefore that matter is nothing beyond an image in mortal mind." It is the understanding of the indestructibility of the divine consciousness and its manifestation that rejects the suggestions of disease and discord and reduces them to the nothingness which they really always have been.

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