Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/320

292 What cannot love and righteousness achieve for the race? All that can be accomplished, and more than history has yet recorded. All good that ever was written, taught, or wrought comes from God and human faith in the right. Through divine Love the right government is assimilated, the way pointed out, the process shortened, and the joy of acquiescence consummated. May God sanctify our nation's sorrow in this wise, and His rod and His staff comfort the living as it did the departing. O may His love shield, support, and comfort the chief mourner at the desolate home!

My answer to the inquiry, “Why did Christians of every sect in the United States fail in their prayers to save the life of President McKinley,” is briefly this: Insufficient faith or spiritual understanding, and a compound of prayers in which one earnest, tender desire works unconsciously against the modus operandi of another, would prevent the result desired. In the June, 1901, Message to my church in Boston, I refer to the effect of one human desire or belief unwittingly neutralizing another, though both are equally sincere.

In the practice of materia medica, croton oil is not mixed with morphine to remedy dysentery, for those drugs are supposed to possess opposite qualities and so to produce opposite effects. The spirit of the prayer of the righteous heals the sick, but this spirit is of God, and the divine Mind is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; whereas the human mind is a compound of faith and doubt, of fear and hope, of faith in truth and faith in error.