Article January 3, 1920 Issue

"Tribulation worketh patience"

LLOYD EDMUND WHITNEY

That one should turn to divine Love for healing and be denied is impossible, and it is equally impossible for divine Love to render less than perfect and instantaneous healing. An applied understanding of God's law secures immediate and permanent results, as Jesus constantly demonstrated throughout his healing ministry and as every Christian Scientist, in the measure of his understanding of this divine law, is proving to-day. If definite and quick results are not experienced in the effort to apply Christian Science, it is certainly not the fault of Science, for God's law is perfect; but the difficulty lies in the application. When one is tempted to cry out that he has appealed to God in vain, it is of great avail for him to search his own thinking for the cause of such a complaint. No claim of error can withstand a whole-hearted, sincere desire to know and do God's will, and an honest examination of our own thoughts in the light of the knowledge of spiritual facts which Christian Science discloses, will result in uncovering the erroneous belief.

Christian Science shows as the spiritual fact, that Love, God, is the only Mind or Principle of existence, the only Life, and that the real man is the reflection or idea of this infinite divine Mind, always in perfect harmony with God and manifesting His absolute law and power. Man's real existence being in God, no one can spiritually know or express a belief of sin, disease, or death—the opposite of God. In fact, if such a condition were possible as reality, the believer would be instantly and completely annihilated because of the destructible nature of such errors. There being no life or existence in sin, disease, or death, no self-creative or self-sustaining law in them, these errors are a condition of complete vacuity, and belief in them can only be a suppositional claim to an absence of harmony. Then for the sufferer to realize his true, harmonious identity as the image and likeness of God, and thus to experience healing, it is necessary for him to search his own thought and find wherein he has permitted, in either past or present experience, a denial of God's allness, and then to manifest a willingness to let Love be expressed in him by affirming and practicing the infinite goodness and kindness of God.

"Are we really grateful for the good already received? Then we shall avail ourselves of the blessings we have, and thus be fitted to receive more" (Science and Health, p. 3). "The blessings we have"! Dear sufferer, do you realize how graciously and tenderly God has led you during all the years that you believed in evil and ignorantly acknowledged it as a real power? Can you not be grateful that He has sustained you to this hour, clothed you with an understanding of Truth, and that He is even now lovingly equipping you with spiritual graces that you may be a better soldier of Christ? Is it not great cause for rejoicing that you have even faintly glimpsed that, as Paul says, "tribulation worketh patience," and can you not now bravely maintain your vision of this spiritual fact in the face of erring material sense, which you know to be a liar?

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