"COMFORT ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. ... Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together," wrote the prophet Isaiah (40:1,4,5).

The world seeks comfort from a materialistic basis and through a humanized conception of God, but the error of thought which accepts as real the discords of sense, often believing that God is responsible for them, comes under its own mesmerism and affords no comfort. It experiences no lasting peace and feels no assurance of security. Christ Jesus demonstrated true comfort. In the strength of his holy understanding the errors of corporeal sense faded into nothingness before the unbroken harmony of Soul.

"As Christian Scientists you seek to define God to your own consciousness by feeling and applying the nature and practical possibilities of divine Love," writes Mary Baker Eddy in her Message to The Mother Church for 1901 (p. 1). Words alone do not define God, nor can the material senses take cognizance of Him or tell us what is real or unreal. To feel the nature of divine Love and apply its practical possibilities, God must be scientifically understood.

The revelation that God is Mind and that matter is a mere delusion of sense, a misstatement of Mind, hence nothing, is the basis of true comfort and the starting point of Science. Because Mind alone is the Ego, or infinite individuality, which forever expresses itself, there is no private personal consciousness which sits in the darkness of ignorance or grief and blindly gropes after a knowledge of God. Divine Mind in its every expression is light and is its own forever interpreter. It interprets Life as God, without beginning and without end, and individuality as embraced in Mind, forever safe, forever permanent and present.

To feel the presence of God is to evidence the presence, for Mind, or Soul, is the intelligence that feels. Matter, being devoid of intelligence, is devoid of feeling. The material senses define their own subjective state of thought. They tell us nothing of the true status of being. All that Mind, God, is capable of feeling is His own harmony. All that Mind is capable of knowing is its own self-existence. The pure Soul-sense or consciousness which declares I live, I exist, I am, is Mind, the one Ego, infinite Love, identifying itself in infinite manifestation and declaring its own omnipresence.

What are the practical possibilities of divine Love? The nature of Love is to bless; its practical possibilities are measured by Love's infinite capacity to be Love. Humanly interpreted, these possibilities include the redemption of the whole world from sin, disease, and death. Actually, Love in its forever allness knows only Love—its magnitude and infinitude, its self-renewal and perpetual unfoldment, its safety and security, its perfection, beauty, grandeur, might, in endless, ageless, changeless self-expression. In the infinitude of Love there are no vacuums. In the foreverness of being there is no lapse. No room is here for remorse, grief, self-pity, or heaviness. Love's infinitude is Love's all-inclusiveness. The irrepressibility of Life assures its immortality.

From its starting point of the oneness and allness of God and His idea, reasoning infallibly from the standpoint of spiritual existence, Christian Science revolutionizes the human sense of pity and sympathy and demonstrates the healing compassion of the Master. Pity, in its human sense, often implies inferiority in its object; thus it frequently awakens resistance and rebellion. It always sharpens the poignancy of affliction, often causing pain. Many need help, but few crave pity. Yet the Bible says (Ps. 103:13), "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him." In explanation of this, Mrs. Eddy writes in "Unity of Good" (p. 4), "To gain a temporary consciousness of God's law is to feel, in a certain finite human sense, that God comes to us and pities us; but the attainment of the understanding of His presence, through the Science of God, destroys our sense of imperfection, or of His absence, through a diviner sense that God is all true consciousness; and this convinces us that, as we get still nearer Him, we must forever lose our own consciousness of error." Thus with the infallibility of inspiration our Leader reconciles the scientific premise that God is incapable of knowing suffering with the human feeling that divine Love comes to us and removes a burden.

Human sympathy assumes the reality of affliction and implies a kindred sense of suffering. Like human pity, it is wholly mesmeric. Under the mesmeric influence of false sympathy it is not uncommon to see reproduced in one's own experience the error he is magnifying in another's. The sense which feels the burden of another's grief is wholly incapable of healing that grief. Hear our Leader's definition of true sympathy (No and Yes, p. 30): "His [God's] sympathy is divine, not human. It is Truth's knowledge of its own infinitude which forbids the genuine existence of even a claim to error."

Compassion rises to the heights of Love. It obeys the First Commandment implicitly because it acknowledges no reality in aught beside God. Jesus' compassion with its healing efficacy was the reflection of Soul; it embodied the healing power of Love. Sympathy in its highest sense, as "Truth's knowledge of its own infinitude," crosses the threshold of compassion.

In our Leader's writings may be found, through consulting the Concordances, illuminating references to pity, sympathy, compassion, and their derivatives. Compassion relinquishes the false, burdened sense of personal responsibility—the belief that one is a human person responsible for another's welfare. It feels and makes tangible "the nature and practical possibilities of divine Love" by demonstrating that Soul-sense to which nothing exists or has entity but Love in its multifarious manifestations.

In divine Science every valley of sin is exalted and the mountainous belief of a selfhood apart from God is made low. Divine Love forever expresses the symmetry, order, perfection, perpetuity, and completeness of Principle. The comfort of Science, felt and lived, extinguishes the beliefs of the flesh and reveals Soul as the sum total of being. Is not this what alone will heal the world's anguish and meet its need?

So is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: as free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God. Honour all men. Love the brotherhood.—I Peter 2:15—17.