Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/321

Rh The knowledge that all things are possible to God excludes doubt, but differing human concepts as to the divine power and purpose of infinite Mind, and the so-called power of matter, act as the different properties of drugs are supposed to act — one against the other — and this compound of mind and matter neutralizes itself.

Our lamented President, in his loving acquiescence, believed that his martyrdom was God's way. Hundreds, thousands of others believed the same, and hundreds of thousands who prayed for him feared that the bullet would prove fatal. Even the physicians may have feared this.

These conflicting states of the human mind, of trembling faith, hope, and of fear, evinced a lack of the absolute understanding of God's omnipotence, and thus they prevented the power of absolute Truth from reassuring the mind and through the mind resuscitating the body of the patient.

The divine power and poor human sense — yea, the spirit and the flesh — struggled, and to mortal sense the flesh prevailed. Had prayer so fervently offered possessed no opposing element, and President McKinley's recovery been regarded as wholly contingent on the power of God, — on the power of divine Love to overrule the purposes of hate and the law of Spirit to control matter, — the result would have been scientific, and the patient would have recovered.

St. Paul writes: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” And the Saviour of man saith: “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” Human governments