Article February 26, 1921 Issue

"As a very little thing"

HUGH A. STUDDERT KENNEDY

One of the strongest convictions of the human mind is its belief in the grading of difficulties. This problem is accounted easy of solution, that one more difficult, whilst yet another is set down as necessarily insoluble. Faced with any particular question, the human mind braces itself suitably for the task. It calls to its aid what it considers the requisite amount of assistance and, in proportion to the accepted gravity of the case, its fears are increased.

Now Christian Science teaches that there are really no degrees of difficulty in any problem which the student of Christian Science is called upon to solve. As Mrs. Eddy makes so clear on page 418 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," one erroneous condition is no more difficult to heal than another. "It must be clear to you," she says there, "that sickness is no more the reality of being than is sin. This mortal dream of sickness, sin, and death should cease through Christian Science. Then one disease would be as readily destroyed as another."

Nevertheless, the conviction that this is not so, the temptation to acquiesce in the world's estimate of certain difficulties, is one which every Christian Scientist finds himself beset with very frequently. Confronted with a claim of disease in himself or another, of discord in his own estate or that of another, or with any kind of problem, almost unconsciously he finds himself estimating the difficulty, whereas the truth is that there is no difficulty. Reality, Principle, God, is not in the fire, nor in the wind, nor yet in the earthquake. No doubt if a modern meteorologist had been by he could have explained to Jesus, in the storm-tossed boat on the Sea of Galilee, the impossibility of stilling the tempest. He could have shown how the wind that was sweeping down on them across the valley of the Jordan depended on climatic conditions spreading themselves over continents, and taking weeks for their formation. Jesus would none the less have stilled the tempest, and there would have been a great calm. Why? Because it is impossible to conceive of the man who could walk on the water, heal multitudes, and raise the dead, considering for one moment the question of material obstacles.

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