among the churches grows out of this as well as the many cults which
seek the proof of the love of God in health, happiness and prosperity.
And indeed all this is natural and right enough. If religion be real the
fruits of it should be manifest, though whether these are the more
significant and enduring fruits of the spirit may be questioned. A
religion which demonstrates itself in motor-cars and generous incomes
and more than comfortable raiment may be real enough to those who
profess it, but its reality is not quite the reality of the religion of
the Sermon on the Mount.

Christian Science is in line with a distinct contemporaneous demand to
demonstrate God's love in about the terms of Jacob's famous vow at
Bethel--"If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go,
and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on so that I come again
to my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God." This is a
far cry from the noble protestation of Job which sounds still across the
years: "Though he slay me, still will I trust in him."

And yet the more sensitive and richly endowed among the followers of
Mary Baker Eddy have found in Christian Science other values than these.
They have passed, by a sort of saving instinct, beyond its
contradictions and half-truths to what is centrally best in the whole
system. God, that is, has a meaning for life not hereafter but now, not
in creeds but in experience, not alone in hard disciplinary ways, but in
loving and intimate and helpful ways. True enough, this is no monopoly
of Christian Science; Christianity holds this truth in fee simple. But
unfortunately, in ways which it is perfectly possible to trace, the
great emphases of Christianity have in the past been too largely shifted
from this.

There has been and still is in most Protestant churches too much
reticence about the meaning of God for the individual life and maybe too
great hesitation in really using to the full the proffer of divine
power. The accepted understandings of the place of pain and suffering in
life have been, as it were, a barrier between the perplexed and their
God; His love has not, somehow, seemed sufficiently at the service of
men, and though Christian Science secures the unchallenged supremacy of
the love of God by emptying it of great ranges of moral meaning and
shutting away therefrom all the shadowed side of life, it has probably
justified the love of God to multitudes who have, for