Article August 21, 1926 Issue

Depending on God

THOMAS C. HOLLINGSHEAD

WHEN he had made his remarkable demonstration of stilling the tempest, we are told that the Master asked of his disciples the pointed question, "How is it that ye have no faith?" In the presence of this astounding proof of his own dependence on God and the unquestionable value of such dependence, how this question must have roused his followers! Their lack of dependence on and understanding of the support, protection, and good always available to them through the ever-presence of divine Love, and their fear of and belief in the reality of evil, had nearly resulted in the swamping of their ship, and had finally driven them in terror to the Master, lying so calmly "in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow," with the despairing cry, "Master, carest thou not that we perish?"

Awakened thus suddenly from his sleep, the Master did not join them in their fear. Not for an instant did he accept the threatening evil as real. His continual intercourse with his Father, divine Love, infinite good, did not permit of any evil becoming real to him. With his usual calm self-possession, "he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm."

"It was the consummate naturalness of Truth in the mind of Jesus," Mrs. Eddy writes in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 200), "that made his healing easy and instantaneous." And she adds, "Jesus regarded good as the normal state of man, and evil as the abnormal." It mattered not how suddenly any phase of this abnormal unreality presented itself to him, he was ready with his denial and his dismissing command, "Get thee behind me, Satan." His disciples then had not attained the point where one form of evil was as equally unreal as another to them. Although they had seen their Master heal the sick, feed the multitude, and even raise the dead, they had not altogether learned that these various forms of error were overcome simply and solely because their supposititious reality was destroyed through Jesus' absolute trust in and dependence on the allness of God, good. This trust was so supreme in his thought, this good was so naturally the real, that his disciples' lack of dependence on God brought his chiding, "O ye of little faith."

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