Article July 25, 1953 Issue

OMNIPRESENCE

RICHARD CLARKE

Omnipresence includes the ceaseless presence and ever-availability of the divine laws that maintain the perfection of all that God has created. These laws are discerned and understood through faithful study of the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. The teaching in this textbook enables one to prove how thoroughly practical Christian Science is and how applicable to every human condition and need.

A passage in this textbook which reveals the basis upon which this practicality rests reads (pp. 470, 471), "The relations of God and man, divine Principle and idea, are indestructible in Science; and Science knows no lapse from nor return to harmony, but holds the divine order or spiritual law, in which God and all that He creates are perfect and eternal, to have remained unchanged in its eternal history." No lapse from harmony! What profound assurance! And eminently provable and practical, as the following experience shows. The writer was a teacher of crafts. In one class was a big boy who had outgrown his clothes; his jacket was too small, and he always kept it buttoned. This interfered with the movement of his arms and generally impeded his work. No amount of persuasion, suggestion, or pressure to remove the coat made any difference.

At last the time came when the teacher lovingly let it be understood that the boy need expect no more help with his work until he was prepared to take off his coat and to do what was right. Still he remained obdurate. Then the teacher, sensing a crisis, handled the problem according to the teaching of Christian Science. Alone at his desk, he saw the error to be insubordination, a belief in more than one Mind; the one Mind cannot know insubordination, or be insubordinate to itself. A sentence from the textbook next came to thought (p. 271): "Neither emasculation, illusion, nor insubordination exists in divine Science." The teacher held to the truth of being, which reveals the allness and oneness of the divine Mind: Mind embraces all its ideas and governs them harmoniously; these ideas, being harmoniously related to and governed by divine Mind, must be harmoniously related to each other; obedience is therefore natural to all these ideas. At this moment in his realization of Truth the teacher saw the boy several yards away leave his bench, go to the cloak room outside, and immediately return without his coat. He then collected his work and brought it in the ordinary way to the teacher to be examined.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

THE WAY TO HARMONIOUS RELATIONSHIPS