Article June 10, 1933 Issue

Quest for Happiness

BEATRICE DE F. BARTLE

HOW vital and necessary to everyone is happiness! It is a goal toward which all mankind is struggling. Yet, looking out upon a material world one is confronted with the results of the common belief that happiness is at the mercy of chance, of circumstance; that it is mysteriously elusive, possibly here today, perchance gone tomorrow.

The explanation of this enigma surely lies in the fact that down through the centuries men have put their trust in material resources. They have largely left God out of their plans and purposes, and staked their happiness upon frail material conditions and circumstances, those shifting, changing elements of human experience which ignore the presence, power, and love of the infinite Father-Mother God. The outcome is inevitable—a world darkened by sadness, fear, sin, sickness, and lack. So it must continue until men awake from the dense sleep of materiality, and refuse to be blinded by the testimony of the senses. The age-old lie, "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil," still allures and deceives. In spite of all the sorrowful effects attached to the belief in evil as real, it yet continues to claim untold victims. In this connection Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 227): "Citizens of the world, accept the 'glorious liberty of the children of God,' and be free! This is your divine right. The illusion of material sense, not divine law, has bound you, entangled your free limbs, crippled your capacities, enfeebled your body, and defaced the tablet of your being."

To be perfectly happy means to be perfectly free; and to realize perfect freedom mankind must loose itself from the fetters of finite sense. This can be accomplished only by turning from the mortal sense of things and gaining an understanding of God and His spiritual, perfect creation. Christian Science has brought to mankind the glorious light of the revealed truth of perfect God and perfect man. Errors of belief are destroyed as one clings steadfastly to the spiritual fact of being, and resists and denies the material seeming. As God, good, is enthroned in consciousness, and man is seen as His image and likeness, not material but spiritual, perfect and complete, the darkness of materialistic belief disappears before the sunshine of spiritual reality, and we begin to find true happiness, dominion, peace, and plenty, the divine heritage of each of God's children.

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Manna for Today
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