Editorial August 24, 1929 Issue

"Abundantly satisfied"

Duncan Sinclair

The Psalmist was aware of the fact that genuine satisfaction is spiritual when he wrote these words of the thirty-sixth psalm: "How excellent is thy lovingkindness, O God! therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings. They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house; and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures." He was convinced that materiality—the things that pertain to the material senses or the flesh—never truly satisfies, and that only in the consciousness of spiritual Truth and in the living of a life devoted to the purposes of good, is enduring happiness to be found.

Sometimes it does not seem easy to convince men of the futility of materiality. There are those who appear to have to drink the cup of material sensuousness to the dregs before recognizing the pernicious effects of their actions—the disease that may result, the sorrow that may come to them and also to others, the joylessness, the unhappiness, which may ensue. It is an old story, a story as old indeed as the human race itself. For, believing man to be material and in possession of real material senses, mortals have been deluded by their beliefs into the gratification of these senses, with the result that the history of the human race is largely a record of sorrow, suffering, and woe.

The gratification of material sense, or sensuousness, is sin. Hence, much of the sorrow, suffering, and unhappiness of the world, since it results from the gratification of material sense, may be reckoned as the inevitable effects of sin. The question then is, How is mankind to get rid of much of its suffering, its woes, its unhappiness? Obviously, it must be by ceasing to sin, or, in other words, by ceasing to indulge in material sensuousness. And the first step in the process of rectification is to see the error of its ways, the futility of its material beliefs,—that there is no real and abiding satisfaction in them,—and so cease from them. Mrs. Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 296), "Mortal belief must lose all satisfaction in error and sin in order to part with them." Should this be difficult when it is recognized that sin is productive only of unhappiness?

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