Article November 20, 1948 Issue

ARE WE REALLY GRATEFUL FOR LIFE, TRUTH, AND LOVE?

SARAH ELEANOR PAINE

On page 3 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy our Leader makes an incisive statement: "If we are ungrateful for Life, Truth, and Love, and yet return thanks to God for all blessings, we are insincere and incur the sharp censure our Master pronounces on hypocrites." The writer has found it helpful to ask herself if she is truly and continuously grateful for Life, Truth, and Love.

Christian Scientists are usually thankful, and rightly so, for outward blessings—for restored and preserved health, for demonstrations of guidance, supply, and harmony in their human affairs. These effects of Christian Science are reasons for great gratitude, which frequently finds expression in testimonies at our Wednesday meetings and in our periodicals. Far above the visible manifestations of harmony, however, is the infinite reality of Life. Truth, and Love. This is always the greatest cause for gratitude, both before and after our human experiences show the results of realizing the all-power of God, good, and the consequent powerlessness of evil.

We can always be grateful to God for the very fact that He is, and that He is Life, Truth, and Love. These names for the Supreme Being have their foundation in the Bible. There we read that Moses said of God to the children of Israel, "He is thy life;" "A God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he" (Deut. 30:20 and 32:4). In the New Testament the beloved disciple declares (I John 4:16), "God is love." This unfolding revelation is clearly summarized by our Leader when she writes in a sermon entitled "The People's Idea of God" (p. 2), "Proportionately as the people's belief of God, in every age, has been dematerialized and unfinited has their Deity become good; no longer a personal tyrant or a molten image, but the divine Life, Truth, and Love,—Life without beginning or ending, Truth without a lapse or error, and Love universal, infinite, eternal."