In her Message to The Mother Church for 1901 (p. 20) Mrs. Eddy has written, "The Christian Scientist is alone with his own being and with the reality of things." This state of being alone with one's thoughts in the constructive work of communing with God or executing His spiritual behests is requisite. It includes those moments and hours of silent prayer where may be found the sweet peace and calm joy of spiritual preparation, replenishment, unfoldment. It is the heart's reaching out for God, and finding Him. This loneness is constancy of devotion to Truth, the purification of the human consciousness, that it may be truly evangelized. Such loneness equips the individual to go forth amidst a suffering humanity with the high purpose of rescuing it from its suffering sense and from every phase of error's thralldom.

There is a wide difference between this being alone with one's thoughts in the active, constructive effort to gain a better understanding of God and that other sense which might be defined as loneliness or lonesomeness. The one is an essential to spiritual growth: the other, an error to be overcome. Human beings have believed happiness to be dependent largely upon material things: money, for instance, or the power that it seems to have. Particularly, have they stressed the belief that in human companionship lies the greatest measure of happiness. Now, there is a right idea of companionship that is truly beautiful; it is that which tends to bring out in human experience the highest spiritual qualities and attributes. This is the love that desires to bless.

However, there is a mistaken sense of companionship wherein selfishness is involved. When this obtains, and the belief of personal possession is manifest between friends or loved ones, we observe that when such relationships are severed the mortal mind quality named loneliness comes in and takes possession of human thought. This error continues with its unhappy tendencies until it is learned that man is spiritual, and that each one must sooner or later prove for himself a higher state of joy than that which comes from mere personal association. There are times, for instance, when God alone can bring comfort and consolation to the troubled, lonely heart. And as the sunlight of morning bursts forth, dispelling the darkness of night, God, good, does unfailingly correct the error.

Let us take for example the experience of Jacob. We are told in Genesis that "Jacob was left alone." He was working out a great problem—wrestling with and overcoming a false, material sense of life. He fought with the error, the temptation, alone within his own thought, until the day dawned—until the light of divine intelligence appeared to him. Jesus, in the wilderness, overcoming the three great temptations of mortal mind, was likewise alone, performing the important preparatory or foundational work of his career.

Christian Science gives us that wondrously clear distinction between the spiritual, the real man of God's creating and the so-called Adam-man, or mortal concept misnamed man. Right here and now the understanding of reality may be gained through Christian Science. Then it will be seen that there are supreme moments wherein one can find great joy and profit in being alone. Such loneness is singularly parallel to those hours in which Jesus repaired to the mountain side for silent prayer and communion with God, always with the unselfish motive of fitting himself for the ministry of healing. And when he again mingled with the crowds, he was there for the constructive purpose of blessing, comforting, cheering, healing, and saving humanity. In this work he found a full measure of joy. He did not need the companionship of others merely for the purpose of satisfying his own human longings or in order to find happiness.

It is the selfishness inherent in mortal mind that would make us lonely and unhappy. If we would overcome this unhappy tendency, all we need to do is to find the true idea of Life that Christian Science so freely and so fully confers upon us in an understanding thereof. This means that we must learn more of God, His nature and character, and reflect that nature in our own lives. Thus we gain an entirely new ideal or outlook. We drop the false, selfish sense of seeking the companionship of others merely for our own gratification and material pleasure, and we learn to "put on the new man," as St. Paul says, in our quest for and our finding of the real, the abiding, and the true.

There is no greater joy than that of unselfish service in ministering to others, helping them to find freedom from the bondage of sickness or sin. To do this, however, one needs to know, in some measure, the purposes and aims of life, and to become conscious of man's oneness with divine Life. This inseparability frees the individual from feeling alone or lonely, and causes him to feel that sweet sense of God's presence and to know that "in him we live, and move, and have our being."

When one thus finds his true relationship to God through sacred silences by night or by day, in prayer and communion, he is being prepared for the ministry of unselfed service among those in need of help and healing. There are wondrously sweet and joyous times also wherein one may mingle with companions journeying along the same spiritual pathway, and such friendships are indeed the highest and purest attainable.

Our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, loved the beauties of nature, and often repaired to quiet places along the seashore or countryside for study and inspiration. Undoubtedly she spent many hours alone with God in her great work for humanity. In"Christian Science versus Pantheism" (p. 3) she has written: "My sense of nature's rich glooms is, that loneness lacks but one charm to make it half divine—a friend, with whom to whisper, 'Solitude is sweet.' Certain moods of mind find an indefinable pleasure in stillness, soft, silent as the storm's sudden hush; for nature's stillness is voiced with a hum of harmony, the gentle murmur of early morn, the evening's closing vespers, and lyre of bird and brooklet.

Copyright, 1935, by The Christian Science Publishing Society, One, Norway Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Entered at Boston post office as second-class matter. Acceptance for mailing at a special rate of postage provided for in section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917, authorized on July 11, 1918.