Article November 7, 1931 Issue

Our Ships Come In

RUFUS STEELE

Humanity will be happy when humanity's ship comes in! The harassed human family has believed this through countless generations. Always one's happiness has seemed to wait upon fulfillment, and fulfillment has found nothing more inspiring or tangible to prefigure it than the arrival in one's port of a ship laden with treasure to which one could set up no actual or legitimate claim.

From this viewpoint the human heart has weighed a prospect that has made pessimism almost a normal state of consciousness. Almost the only thing that has been clear has been one's longing. But between longing and realization there has appeared, first, the necessity of affixing ownership rights to that good ship somewhere beyond the horizon, and, thereafter, the necessity of attracting the ship unerringly to one's self as consignee.

The advent of Christian Science gave men much to think about, since it argued the substitution of spiritual assurance for material uncertainty. Here was a revelation that restored to human consciousness a sense of man's continuous at-one-ment with God; and in the light of this conscious at-one-ment it was seen that one needed only to discover, through spiritual unfoldment, the true nature and cargo of the desired ship; for its arrival at the port of requirement was no more subject to failure than is the divine power which is the only source of all true happiness. "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation," Mary Baker Eddy proclaims for the reassurance of a despairing world on page 468 of her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures;" and on page 250 of the same work she dissipates the false limitations of human hope with emancipating clause, "nor will Science admit that happiness is ever the sport of circumstance."

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