Article December 19, 1936 Issue

"The garment of praise"

CONSTANCE E. HEBER PERCY

Isaiah tells us that, among other blessings, the Christ is "to comfort all that mourn; ... to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;" and Christian Science reveals to the receptive heart just how the Christ, Truth, does this.

A student of Christian Science remembers with great gratitude her own joyous experience in recognizing and applying the redeeming truth. Waking one morning with a sense of utter hopelessness, she set to work to clear her thought through affirmation of the truth about God and man, as taught in the Bible and in the writings of the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy. Declaring God's infinite goodness and love, together with the omnipresence and omnipotence of this goodness and love, she endeavored to see herself as dwelling in, and as the evidence of, that goodness and love, and therefore conscious only of good, joy, and freedom.

For some time the sense of depression persisted, but suddenly the light dawned with these words from "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 150): "Ask God to enable you to reflect God, to become His own image and likeness, even the calm, clear, radiant reflection of Christ's glory." She found hereself obeying this behest and affirming with great joyousness that she was "the calm, clear, radiant reflection of Christ's glory"—the glory of the perfect, ideal man—and that darkness and depression could not enter that clear radiance to touch her, any more than darkness can dwell in the presence of light or interfere with it. Needless to say, "the spirit of heaviness" was replaced with "the garment of praise."

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