Article January 12, 1957 Issue

RECEPTIVITY TO LOVE'S GIVING

WILL B. DAVIS

The ever-availability and constancy of God's goodness were taught by our great Way-shower. Through the study of the words and works of Christ Jesus, as recorded in the Bible, we learn that God is the infinite giver. God is divine Love, and spiritual man, made in God's likeness, is capable of receiving the good that Love gives. Sickness, disease, and lack can be eliminated from human experience through our understanding of these fundamental truths concerning the nature of God as Love and through a realization that God's idea, the real man, receives the good Love imparts. Therefore man's ability, right activity, health, harmony, and freedom are divinely bestowed.

However, from a human standpoint all sorts of opinions and beliefs concerning our activities, including the cause, cure, and prevention of sickness, would, if accepted, seem to interfere with our receiving the good that Love imparts. These opinions are put forth in advertisements of material remedies and in various other ways. For example, we hear a good deal of sympathetic diagnosis: such well-meaning remarks as, "It must have been something you ate that upset you"; or, "You must have been sitting in a draft"; or again, "You are probably suffering because you eat your meals at such irregular intervals." Then too it is so easy to feel that we are being kind and loving to a friend or relative or a coworker by saying, "I guess you've been working too hard, too long, or too late."

In a very direct statement on page 385 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy warns against just such conversation: "You say that you have not slept well or have overeaten. You are a law unto yourself. Saying this and believing it, you will suffer in proporation to your belief and fear. Your sufferings are not the penalty for having broken a law of matter, for it is a law of mortal mind which you have disobeyed." And in the next paragraph Mrs. Eddy says, "Any suposed information, coming from the body or from inert matter as if either were intelligent, is an illusion of mortal mind,-one of its dreams."

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