Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/187

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Beloved Brethren: — Never more sweet than to-day, seem to me, and must seem to thee, those words of our loved Lord, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end.” Thus may it ever be that Christ rejoiceth and comforteth us. Sitting at his feet, I send to you the throbbing of every pulse of my desire for the ripening and rich fruit of this branch of his vine, and I thank God who hath sent forth His word to heal and to save.

At this period, the greatest man or woman on earth stands at the vestibule of Christian Science, struggling to enter into the perfect love of God and man. The infinite will not be buried in the finite; the true thought escapes from the inward to the outward, and this is the only right activity, that whereby we reach our higher nature. Material theories tend to check spiritual attraction — the tendency towards God, the infinite and eternal — by an opposite attraction towards the temporary and finite. Truth, life, and love are the only legitimate and eternal demands upon man; they are spiritual laws enforcing obedience and punishing disobedience.

Even Epictetus, a heathen philosopher who held that Zeus, the master of the gods, could not control human will, writes, “What is the essence of God? Mind.” The general thought chiefly regards material things, and keeps