Article October 13, 1928 Issue

"While they are yet speaking"

KATHERINE PUFFER

Perhaps no statement of Scripture is more fraught with assurance than that found in Isaiah: "And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear." Nor is there one which calls for greater faith than this positive utterance of the present activity of good. Hampered as we may have been through many years by the limiting teaching of a personal God and a material man, we have been correspondingly blinded to the full import of the promises. And when God has not answered prayer as we have desired, we have lost faith both in the promise and in the effectiveness of prayer. Without doubt, the false belief that God does not answer prayer, and that speedily, has engendered fear and occasioned much skepticism and infidelity.

This "going-to-be" teaching of false theology will cling to us like burrs from a burdock bush unless we resolutely and persistently pluck it from our thought. "Going to be perfect," "going to be well," "going to heaven when we die"—all express vague hopes in an indefinite future, clogging the wheels of scientific growth and hindering our demonstrations or practical applications of Biblical promises. Great should be the joy of every Christian Scientist that these fetters are giving place to a scientific knowledge of the reality of good, here and now. Related to this statement of Isaiah is that of Mrs. Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 428), where she says, "The great spiritual fact must be brought out that man is, not shall be, perfect and immortal."

As students of mathematics, we all know that the answer to every mathematical problem already exists; and the answer in every case is obtained by the correct use of the necessary rules. Does not this illustrate the process of true prayer in Christian Science, and at the same time throw light on the metaphysics of the promise above quoted, "Before they call, I will answer"? The answer to our problem exists in divine Principle, God. The truth of existence comprises the answer, always ready, always at hand. The perfection of man exists simultaneously with creation. As soon as thought is brought into accord with divine Mind, or, in other words, while we "are yet speaking," God hears. For God, Mind, knowing His own ideas, is ever expressing Himself through them, and, as Mrs. Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 83), "holding man forever in the rhythmic round of unfolding bliss, as a living witness to and perpetual idea of inexhaustible good."

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