Truth Brooks No Delay

The saying of the old German poet that "The mills of God grind slowly," is often repeated, and this thought has no doubt helped some of us, now and then, to practise a kind of enforced patience which accepts a situation we have seemed too stupid or too ignorant to handle; nevertheless, it is competent to convey, and is constantly encouraging a subtle and pronounced error.

God has no occasion to bide His time that He may the more coolly and calculatingly o'erwhelm His enemies; He administers no slow vengeance upon any body or any thing, and he would not encourage us to grit our teeth and endure injustice and iniquity with the assurance that ultimately He will, in His own time, annihilate the evil-doer.

We realize in Christian Science that all these concepts, which have so long held sway in human thought, are far afield, unhelpful, and unworthy. Every manifestation of God—the forces on which we tread (Science and Health, p. 124) and which fashion the fabrics of a spiritual universe that encompasses us with its wonders and its beauty, —all these are the swift messengers of an intelligence which knows no resistance to its unfoldment, and which from all eternity has but spoken and it was done. Every condition in God's kingdom is met upon the instant of its appearance, and it is in the fact that the invariability of divine law inheres. As speeds the light to the banishment of every pretence of the dark, so springs to its instant consummation every least idea of Him with whom we have to do.

When our thought has been freed from the inertia of a grossly material sense and we enter the more ethereal though not less crowded and tangible, realm of the humanly invisible, the elimination of the time element is more and more marked. The flight of the electric impulse through the vast, uncharted stretches of space, startles us with its confirmations of that immediateness of effect, however distant the point of manifestation, which makes it one with cause. The only logy thing in the universe is no thing, it is a lie.

The disabilities entailed by this false concept are apparent and serious. Human experience and habits of thought have begotten familiarity with slow growth, and in no small degree they have led us to think of truth as time-consuming in its work. It is very easy to acquire an unconscious facility in compounding those narcotic explanations which effect permanent injury while affording a passing relief, and if we are thus led to be content with delays in demonstrations, and to explain them without due consideration of our own possible dormancy and inexactness or intermittence of thought, we are sadly astray, and the results can but be lamentable. If we are led to be any more tolerant of our own slow pace in spiritual advance, any more compromising or obliging in our attitude toward our own recognized weaknesses, or any other enemy of good, then indeed have we joined hands with a tempter who will reward us with pain.

Happily the truth is available here also, and all these dangers may be avoided if we are but alert and drink daily and deeply at that fountain which has been opened for us.

Our indebtedness to Christian Science mounts higher at this point, perhaps, than at any other, and for the reason that every possible danger and weakness of human experience is savingly reached by the right apprehension of Him in whom all things "move and have their being," the realization of His omnipresence and the instant effectiveness of His all power. W.

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