Article November 18, 1944 Issue

"Comforters . . . of Christlike touch"

MARIAN J. WEINHOLD

"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God." Ages old, this loving command rings out today a louder call than ever before, and it is meeting with a large response.

To obey this command men must first understand what comfort is. Too often it is confused with a wrong sense of sympathy. But comfort and this kind of sympathy are leagues apart. Their paths diverge at the outset, as the derivation of each word shows. To sympathize with a person in a common use of the term is to feel his anguish as though it were your own and to suffer with him in his trial. Mary Baker Eddy gives us the true sense of sympathy when she says (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 102): "The sympathy of His eternal Mind is fully expressed in divine Science, which blots out all our iniquities and heals all our diseases." And real comfort imparts strength and encouragement. What weights would be lifted if all today could say, "I have come to comfort you."

Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane, reached out to his disciples for comfort when he said, "Could ye not watch with me one hour?" Could they have given him the strengthening aid of their conviction of the rightness of his mission, that hour might have been shorn of some of its anguish.

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