Article January 8, 1938 Issue

Reassurance

MAUDE E. HEALY

Mankind seems perpetually in need of reassurance. The timid child seeks his mother's protecting care. Erring youth craves forgiveness and renewed trust. Invaluable are the inspiring confidence and encouragement of teacher, employer, or friend, to one tormented by uncertainty, impatience, disappointment, or self-condemnation. Ugly suggestions of failure, poverty, sorrow, loss, decrepitude, and loneliness seem to await opportunity to insinuate themselves into unguarded human consciousness to destroy harmony. Can an effectual safeguard be raised against such intruders? Yes, it can.

The vital reminder, "Fear not!" permeates the Scriptures. Christian Science reiterates the same potent, compassionate promises of salvation from evil. In fact, Mrs. Eddy declares that its practice "begins with Christ's keynote of harmony, 'Be not afraid!'" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 410). Through its study one learns that evil intimations are but distorted figments of deceitful sense, without actuality, basis, consistency, or power of recurrence. The substitution of right ideas, evolved from infinite Mind, destroys false theories and heals discord of every kind.

A student of Christian Science, who was privileged to visit the Carlsbad caverns in New Mexico, descended by winding trails many hundred feet, and was awed by the grandeur of the surroundings, vividly accentuated by means of indirect lighting. Resting beside a massive stalagmite, the accertain of millions of years, she awaited with keen interest a promised moment of total darkness and taut silence, when all light would be extinguished and there would follow "a night without a star" (ibid., p. 564). As the pall of impenetrable blackness suddenly engulfed the place, material sense neither received nor conveyed a single identifying impression. All seemed to have been swallowed in an abysmal void. Tense, and somewhat confounded by the inability to take a single step, she would have found such obscuration terrifying, but for the comforting intelligence that all remained unchanged, and that in a moment effectual contact with the electric current would bring to light the loveliness which she had enjoyed before.

Enjoy 1 free Sentinel article or audio program each month, including content from 1898 to today.

Send a comment to the editors
NEXT IN THIS ISSUE
Article
Undisturbed
January 8, 1938
Contents

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit