THE HEART'S FAR CRY

John B. Willis

The struggle of unrestful sense has been so vast, so continuous, and withal so personal with each one of us, that we are led to think of it as the incense of mortal hope ascending for ever and ever. Lured by that ever expectant, ever disappointed desire which often degenerates into a consuming appetite for some bauble of earthly gain or achievement, men are led to forget the rights of others, and to sacrifice rectitude and every other sweet and blessed thing for the realization of an expectation which has never been fulfilled and which never can be.

Nevertheless, how authoritatively does this restless longing witness to our superiority to the animal, to a capacity for progress, aye, to our nobler nature's kinship to God, apart from whom mankind are ever companioning with turmoil and with tears. Thus the tragedies of life bring high disclosure, for they tell of the unnaturalness of a life of disappointment and sorrow, they reecho the decree of heaven that men must be reconciled to God, and there is no escape from this mandate. Though submerged in the socalled pleasures of sense, or the struggle for prominence and power, men still find that they have to do with a deeper want, which will not cease to cry out for the living God.

Job's plaintive cry, "Oh, that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to his seat!" expresses this spiritual aspiration. It tells of that unsatisfied seeking for the good and true which is one of the most pitiful as well as one of the most encouraging facts of human experience. It is interesting, however, to note that this cry of Job is expressed in terms which to those instructed in Christian Science reveal one of the important reasons why efforts to find God have so often failed. The Christian Scientist has come to see that nothing hinders the attainment of a demonstrable knowledge of God more surely than His localization in our thought, the belief that He has place relations; and this for the reason that it speaks for our limitation of the divine nature, that false concept to which Mrs. Eddy refers when she says, "Human philosophy has made God manlike" (Science and Health, p. 269).

This is one of the most distinguishing and fundamental teachings of Christian Science, that God is omnipotent Truth; that there is no far-away-ness to His place and power. The moment we place any limitation upon the ideal, that moment we assault its essential nature, and would thus unwittingly destroy it; and the psalmist-poet must have had the rebuke of this devastating denial of the divine nearness in view when he wrote that wondrous passage, beginning: "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?"

The significance of the Christian Science concept of God as divine Principle becomes more clear as we think of how inseparable from us is every universal or axiomatic truth, that which we accept by virtue of our intuitive recognition of its verity. Such truths are forever present and forever available to all. They are forever at hand, and not afar off. Every basic law of mathematics is thought of in this way, and when God is regarded as the Principle of being, of all law, order, action, and intelligence, from that moment we begin to have a new sense of the impossibility of the divine removal, and the psalmist's words are thereafter fraught with a new and significant meaning.

Job's cry, the cry of every heart, perchance, in its Gethsemane, is the cry of a fettered sense, an unperfected aspiration. To apprehend the universality, the omnipresence of divine Truth, is to begin to make it ours. Each can find and appropriate it without let or hindrance, because he knows it belongs to him as it belongs to all, and Christian Science is satisfying the heart's deep longing by acquainting it anew with God, whom it reveals as "universal, eternal, divine Love" (Science and Health, p. 140).

John B. Willis.

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THE JOY OF OVERCOMING

November 18, 1911

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