Article December 8, 1951 Issue

FINDING THE REAL JOY

LOIS BUCKNAM GARDNER

Our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, tells us in her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 481), "God's being is infinity, freedom, harmony, and boundless bliss." How natural for God, who is all-loving, to be boundlessly and ceaselessly blissful! From this it follows that joy is the natural expression of God and so characterizes His image and likeness, man. Man is not a being apart from God, happy because of honors, glories, or pleasures, but he is the very radiance of God's joy.

This veritable man, of whom a mortal is the counterfeit, is described on page 76 of the textbook, where Mrs. Eddy says: "The sinless joy,—the perfect harmony and immortality of Life, possessing unlimited divine beauty and goodness without a single bodily pleasure or pain,—constitutes the only veritable, indestructible man, whose being is spiritual." It is a great discovery to find that joy constitutes man. Mortal man thinks his joy comes from without and is dependent upon material possessions, position, or the companionship of certain persons; but Science reveals joy to be an essential element of true being.

That God is forever rejoicing is revealed by the Scriptures. "Thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures" declared the Psalmist (Ps. 36:8); and again he said, "In thy presence is fulness of joy" (Ps. 16:11). The Divine Being includes within itself all joy, as well as all good, all intelligence, and all substance. Is not God forever at the standpoint of boundless bliss, and may we not say that man is the embodiment of this bliss, for "God expresses in man the infinite idea forever developing itself, broadening and rising higher and higher from a boundless basis" (Science and Health, p. 258)?

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