Editorial May 20, 1972 Issue

"They shall be comforted"

Carl J. Welz

Christ Jesus was talking about something far greater than material comfort when he said, "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted."^{Matt. 5:4;} And he promised, "the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things."^{John 14:26;}

The material sense of comfort is deceptive. It leads us to believe in material life as satisfying, in material substance as giving us security, and in material circumstances as the essentials for happiness and affection. But the belief in matter is an error that never provides real satisfaction, security, or joy. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures Mary Baker Eddy writes, "Discomfort under error is preferable to comfort."^{Science and Health, p. 101;} And she says: "The loss of earthly hopes and pleasures brightens the ascending path of many a heart. The pains of sense quickly inform us that the pleasures of sense are mortal and that joy is spiritual."^{p. 265 .} If we lose something that is part of our material sense of life, we mourn for it until we are somehow comforted. But the losses we sustain become gains when they impel us to seek as our goal an understanding of spiritual life, substance, and being. God, Spirit, is the only real Life, the only substance, the only Truth. Man is the reflection of God. The understanding Christian Science brings us gives us comfort in Truth.

Because man reflects God, he coexists with Him in immortal Life. Man's being is as timeless as Spirit and Truth. What we see as the coming and going of mortals is the false view of man. The individuals we see are not self-originated, nor are they originated by other mortals; they are, in reality, ideas of the divine Mind. But we are deceived into seeing these ideas as mortals who begin at their own point in time and end at another point in time. The deceptive view is not merely a view of an individual but the entire falsehood of matter as life, substance, and being. The individual we see temporally is much more than a temporal individual, but to the extent that our view of being is temporal, we see and experience each individual in a temporal sense.

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