While one's thoughts at this season are filled with thanksgiving for abundant harvests, good business, happy relationships, healthy lives, may we pause in grateful acknowledgment of the power of God, Spirit, that underlies this largess. When one believes that abundance is the sole result of his own special knowledge, wisdom, foresight, energy, or good fortune apart from God, he limits himself and his opportunities. Christian Science turns one to the true source of all bountifulness, to God, Life. Truth, and Love.

God supplies continuously every spiritual idea requisite to the full enjoyment of immortal being. These ideas are revealed to human consciousness through spiritual understanding and result in abundant supply, health, success.

Paul in the ninth chapter of his second letter to the Corinthians speaks of "being enriched in every thing to all bountifulness, which causeth through us thanksgiving to God" (verse 11), and he concludes the chapter in these words (verse 15): "Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift." That which is unspeakable is indescribable in human language. While material gifts can be described by reference to size, weight, color, form, or some distinguishing marks, the gift of God is visible and appreciable only to spiritual sense. One cannot measure with a line or weigh on a scale the attributes of God, His love, purity, wisdom, understanding, being, substance. The most potent evidence of thanksgiving for the indefinable gifts of God is in activating them in our daily affairs.

"Gratitude is much more than a verbal expression of thanks," writes Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 3). And she explains (ibid.), "Action expresses more gratitude than speech." We thank God by using His free gift of divine Love, by loving God and His spiritual creation. We thank God by acknowledging Him as the only source of wisdom, strength, health, purity, and by evidencing these qualities in our relationships with others in everyday affairs. Though these gifts of God elude human measurement, they are nevertheless ever present and instantly available for expression and enjoyment.

God's gift of goodness is an indivisible whole, but it is expressed individually by each of His spiritual ideas. All partake of God's wholeness, goodness, perfection. John expressed man's relationship to God's bounty thus (1:16): "Of his fulness have all we received."

Among the infinitude of unspeakable gifts for which we should give thanks are grace, righteousness, and joy. These qualities are revealed to human consciousness by God's supreme gift, the Christ. The Christ is an ever-present divine influence unfolding the nature of God—His complete spiritual gift to humanity. It is the Christ which reveals divine wisdom and saves us from unwise actions. It is the Christ which reveals to us the qualities of divine Love and thus prevents us from hating our neighbor or ourselves. It is the Christ which awakens the true consciousness of indescribable spiritual health in our thinking and thus opens the way to healing of the body.

The Christ as the unspeakable gift of God is practical. It operates universally: in the home, in the factory, on the farm, in the schoolroom, in business, in government. It is activated in our experience through its recognition and acceptance into human consciousness. The more one's immortal senses are demonstrated by a growing appreciation and understanding of the qualities of God, the more of the Christ one reflects and the less discord he encounters in daily affairs.

The Comforter, promised by Jesus, is the message which Christian Science gives to the world. It is the spirit of Truth, the Holy Ghost, bringing to humanity deliverance from its ills and sorrows. All who will may enjoy this Comforter, divine Science, which sweeps away the beliefs of inharmony. It is the Christ, Truth, in action everywhere.

"Christian Science," declares Mrs. Eddy in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 349), "is a divine largess, a gift of God—understood by and divinely natural to him who sits at the feet of Jesus clothed in truth, who is putting off the hypothesis of matter because he is conscious of the allness of God—'looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.'"

The gift of the Christ, Truth, the promised Comforter, exceeds all human valuation, for it is a divine gift. But the results of its operation in human consciousness are being measured today by lives saved from destruction, by homes happified, by sin destroyed, by sorrow healed.

As we think in grateful terms of thanksgiving for visible gifts, let us then not omit gratitude for God's invisible bounty. Let us unceasingly express thanks to God in our hearts for His unspeakable gift.

John J. Selover