Article February 14, 1925 Issue

"Adorable One"

HAROLD BOARDMAN

WHEN Jesus was asked by his disciples, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples," he gave them a type of prayer whose form, as given in the gospels, has been known throughout the Christian era as the Lord's Prayer. It were well had it been remembered, however, that this prayer was given as a type. "After this manner therefore pray ye," he said. The precise nature of the form is therefore of secondary importance, the one important thing, always emphasized by our Master, being the nature of the appeal; in other words, the spirit of the prayer. In slavish adherence to mere forms, how true it is that the letter only may be regarded and the vital spirit of prayer and adoration may be almost lost sight of.

In this connection, can we ever cease to feel grateful to our dear Leader, Mrs. Eddy, for giving us the spiritual interpretation of the Lord's Prayer, that prayer which, as she says in our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 16), "covers all human needs"? The more one dwells in consecrated meditation on these gems of spiritual interpretation, the more one enters into the heart of prayer and begins to pray as Jesus did when, on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, often through the night he refreshed his heart with visions of Truth.

Let us consider the second of these gems (ibid., p. 16): "Adorable One." Can we really say this in love and adoration, if the adorable nature of our Father-Mother is but an ideal, a vision on a far-distant horizon? Are we so busy with the problems of the human sense of existence that we find no time to worship the beauty of divine Love? No one ever trod this earth whose life was so filled with beneficent activity as was that of our Master, Christ Jesus; yet he found time, nay, rather, the adorableness of his divine Principle compelled and drew his heart to seek it at the first and at every possible moment as the supreme object of his desire and affection.

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