Editorial June 29, 1946 Issue

"The sanctuary of God"

Margaret Morrison

How often there comes from so-called mortal mind this plaint of self-righteousness and belief in personal goodness: "What's the use of trying to be good? I live as near right as I know how, and yet have nothing but trouble; while my neighbor, who doesn't seem to care how he lives, has all the good things of life."

This is an agelong lament— even the Psalmist thus questioned the justice of God and in the seventy-third Psalm deals with it very fully. Among other presentations of the case he says: "Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches. Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency. For all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning." He continues. "When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me; until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end." We do not know exactly what "the sanctuary of God" meant to the Psalmist, except that there he gained a glimpse of a just God, who could not possibly punish good and reward evil.

To the student of Christian Science the sanctuary of God comes to mean "the secret place of the most High"—even the spiritual understanding of God as Spirit, infinitely just, infinitely good, changeless divine Principle. On page 244 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" Mary Baker Eddy writes, "The 'secret place,' whereof David sang, is unquestionably man's spiritual state in God's own image and likeness, even the inner sanctuary of divine Science, in which mortals do not enter without a struggle or sharp experience, and in which they put off the human for the divine."

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