Article June 14, 1947 Issue

Quietude

MARY BARNES

How great is humanity's need for true quietude, and how vain are efforts to find it in any form of matter! The world can neither give it nor take it away, because it is God-bestowed and God-maintained. In reality it is ever present in the man of His creating, who can neither know nor experience anything underived from his divine source, the one Father-Mother, Love.

The meaning of the word "quietude," from the Latin quiescere —to rest—includes rest, repose, tranquillity. freedom from agitation or alarm. These truly characterize Deity, and therefore are forever expressed by man, His reflection. They do not need to be gained as though they were something outside ourselves, but only to be claimed as qualities coincident with man's being. Their seeming opposites—restlessness, fear, agitation, alarm—not being products of the divine Mind, or creative Principle, are without any true origin or cause, and therefore have no real existence or abiding place in God's image and likeness. They belong wholly to the realm of mortal belief, from which they must not, and actually cannot, ever be elevated.

Repose denotes the absence of fear, and fearlessness is man's natural state of being, his divine birthright. When the impostors of fear, agitation, and alarm threaten to overwhelm us, let us rise in rebellion against these enemies and let us steadfastly claim for ourselves the fearlessness of Love, the calm of Soul, the immovability of Principle, which belong to man through divine reflection. It is the testimony of the material senses that would make us afraid, but we learn in Christian Science that this testimony, however alarming it may seem to be, is never true, but wholly deceitful and fraudulent. It is our duty firmly to deny it instead of unquestioningly accepting it, as is the practice of those uninstructed in the things of Spirit and unaware of the necessity of differentiating daily and hourly between the testimony of Soul and the false evidence of the senses.

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