Article November 1, 1922 Issue

Thankfulness

H. FARMER HALL

In the Old and New Testaments, so great a stress is laid on the necessity of giving thanks to God that students of the Bible cannot but be impressed with the constant recurrence of the demand. We find in the Biblical records of many important events, that they were repeatedly preceded and followed by the giving of thanks. So often does this recur that a closer study of this subject would seem likely to prove profitable; for in thankfulness there is manifested, not merely an appropriate attitude, but a Christianly scientific one.

To give sincere thanks for benefits received, to most of us is, after all, a natural sequence; and it is in this sense that we have generally accepted these references. But, as one looks more closely into the subject, he finds that this limited concept of thankfulness hardly measures up to Scriptural requirements. Evidently, a spasmodic outpouring of grateful feeling is not all that is proposed, but rather an atmosphere of thankfulness,—a habitual mental abiding place, or, as Paul has it, a "giving thanks always for all things unto God." What, then, is this attitude of thankfulness so strongly recommended, and so constantly accompanying successful demonstration? Here a search in the dictionary as to the radical meaning of the word "thank" is enlightening; for we find that the original meaning of the word "thank" was "a thought, a thinking, from the same root as the word think." As we ponder over this definition, we see how the word "thankful" is linked with thinking. A mind filled with thankfulness is evidently filled with some kind of thinking. Now, in Christian Science we learn that God is the one and only Mind; and from this the Christian Scientist concludes that to be truly thankful is to be filled with God's thoughts.

If our estimate of thankfulness has been of the spasmodic variety, what a change in our concept of thankfulness must now take place! How easy it has been in the past to say, "We are so thankful," perhaps for a healing, possibly for the many benefits we have experienced through Christian Science; and then, perchance, a few moments later we have belied our well-meant statement by filling our thoughts with condemnation of ourselves or of our neighbor, quite oblivious of the fact that we have thereby ceased to be truly thankful! Nevertheless, it is so. The mental position required of us in order to be thankful is an abiding "in the secret place of the most High," keeping our minds, as Mrs. Eddy tells us in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 210), "so filled with Truth and Love, that sin, disease, and death cannot enter them." Surely as we consider the word "thankfulness" in this clearer light, we begin to realize its importance, and the reason why we have been so constantly admonished to maintain this attitude of thought.

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