Article July 26, 1941 Issue

"When ye pray"

ELEANOR M. FELLOWES

To pray is a natural instinct with many, and when circumstances seem too hard for men to handle they turn to whatever is their concept of power and cry, "Lord, save us." How important it is to have a true sense of the Lord that saves! On page 576 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy there is the marginal heading "Divine sense of Deity." In this paragraph our Leader gives the scientific meaning of "Lord." The "Lord" that saves is the divine or true sense of God.

Christ Jesus taught that "there is none good but one, that is, God." In Christian Science we also learn that there is no other Truth than God, and that the one and only Mind is God. The most general interpretation of the word "prayer" is entreaty or supplication; but when God is recognized as Principle and Mind, as well as Soul, Spirit, Life, Truth, and Love, the prayer of ignorant appeal gradually gives way to the prayer of spiritual understanding. Faith without understanding is uncertain in its effects. Faith in material ways and means may seem to produce beneficial results within the illusion of material sense, for mortal thought beholds the results of its own thinking. But sooner or later faith in anything less than God, divine Truth, must bring disillusionment.

Mrs. Eddy writes (Science and Health, p. 12), "It is neither Science nor Truth which acts through blind belief, nor is it the human understanding of the divine healing Principle as manifested in Jesus, whose humble prayers were deep and conscientious protests of Truth,—of man's likeness to God and of man's unity with Truth and Love." The Scriptural admonition that "ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss," can never apply to the prayer that is a protest or affirmation of Truth, because in this prayer all that seems amiss is laid aside. The claim that there is a human mind opposed to the divine must be rejected, and with it the spurious evidence of material sense.

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