Article September 2, 1922 Issue

True Comfort

VIOLET KER-SEYMER

Every human being needs comfort in one respect or another; and each one is empowered to find, and entitled to, this comfort in fulfillment of the promise, "Seek, and ye shall find." Some may have yielded to discouragement,—even to bitterness of heart,—feeling that they have sought in vain. Unconsciously, perhaps, this comfort was sought in material systems of philosophy, will-power, or a mistaken sense of prayer. It requires humility to perceive and admit that the so-called human mind is quite unable to find within itself the remedy for its own troubles. "Is not our comforter," Mrs. Eddy writes in "Unity of Good" (p. 18), "always from outside and above ourselves?" The acquiring of humility, then, is one of the first steps to be taken in the direction of spiritual comfort.

Another helpful step lies in analyzing the mental nature of one's discord, one's discomfort. Does this relate to health, to daily supplies, to character, to our relations with others? In each and every case the seat of the suffering is one's own thinking; and it is this thinking which needs and can find true comfort through changing its basis. The promised teaching of the Comforter, or "Spirit of truth," revealed to humanity to-day through Christian Science, does not bid men carry their burdens or bear their sickness, and thus sanction false thinking and its results. Rather does this Comforter lift the cruel burden and heal the ungodly sickness. How is this accomplished, when human methods have failed? Through gaining spiritual thinking, which has a divine, real standard. Most men desire to have a standard of thought, one by which they can find a way out of the medley of bad or indifferent thoughts which throng their consciousness and bring confusion into daily life.

A correct standard points to divine Principle; and in Christian Science this divine Mind or Principle is recognized to be the source of all true, pure ideas, often referred to as angels in the Bible. Thus is true idealism distinguishable from materialism or human ignorance. There is both enlightenment and comfort in the Bible utterance, "I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil." Here, then, is indicated the standard of thought of which every man is in need to-day. Let these words be noted,—"not of evil." No suggestion of fear, of sorrow, anxiety, discord, pain, or any kind of temptation, has ever passed from God to man. Only goodness, true intelligence, health, and abundance of all that is pure and unchanging are being expressed by God's man, the image and likeness of divine Love, which image is unseen by the physical senses. It is the mission of the Comforter to bring to humanity the ideas of God, which regenerate, revealing the real image here and now.

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