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ELIZABETH EARL JONES, CSB
If it be true that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," then it is not too much to say that the faith of the pilgrims is the rock of national life. Abraham was a pilgrim. He was called of God to depart from his father's house and from the lethargy and limitations of old traditions into a more spiritual consciousness of Life and Love, — a veritable land of promise. "And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing," was God's promise to him. His obedience proved that he loved Spirit more than matter, loved God and desired truth above all else, and was willing to sacrifice everything for this. In the epistle to the Hebrews we find this eloquent tribute to the father of pilgrims: "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." Respecting this patriarch and others the record says: "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. . . . And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had the opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city." Still another exile for Christ's sake tells us that he saw the promise. St. John saw "a new heaven and a new earth," and he adds, "I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven." Then he describes it in metaphorical terms, and encourages and inspires our weary hope with this sublime assurance: "The kings of the earth do bring their glory and honor into it. And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there." On page 575 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy tells us what this heavenly city is, and on page 573 she writes, "This testimony of Holy Writ sustains the fact in Science, that the heavens and earth to one human consciousness, that consciousness which God bestows, are spiritual, while to another, the unillumined human mind, the vision is material." The blessing upon Abraham's pilgrimage was that he should be the father of a great nation, in number "as the sand which is upon the seashore," and that of this nation would be born the Messiah, the Saviour of the world. In the thirty-ninth chapter of Genesis we read of another brave exile of this chosen family, — Joseph in Egypt. The famine of which Pharaoh dreamed threatened to destroy the seed of Abraham before the Christ could come; that is, before they were able to receive him. But Joseph, faithful to Truth and Love, was God's messenger. His reflection of divine Love wisely met the need of that hour and thus saved them from the evil. In tender forgiveness and marvelous breadth of vision he said to his brethren when they were reunited: "Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life. For these two years hath the famine been in the land: and yet there are five years, in the which there shall neither be earing nor harvest. And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance." Thus did the pilgrims' obedience preserve the precious seed of Truth, until after many generations should come the harvest and the Son of man send forth his angels to garner the golden sheaves into the Father's storehouse. In the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis we read of the vastly significant blessing which Jacob bestowed upon Joseph: "The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him: but his bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob; (from thence is the shepherd, the stone of Israel:) . . . The blessings of thy father . . . they shall be on the head of Joseph, and on the crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren." Thus we begin to perceive what it is to be a pilgrim and to separate one's self from all evil. It is to desire Truth above all else, to listen for God's voice, and to follow wherever Truth and Love may lead. It calls us out of old beliefs which are not good, true, and progressive, even though it may often mean temporary separation from all we have hitherto cherished. But this very separation clears the vision and blazes the right path for others to follow, and so paves the way for ultimate and genuine unity, peace, and prosperity. In its ripening processes time changes the pilgrim into the pioneer, and causes the vision seen from the lonely mountain to become the golden realization of a grateful world. The immortal craving of the nobler manhood for freedom to serve and worship the ideal, the longing which was expressed in the great exodus of Israel from Egypt under Moses' leadership, found its highest fruitage in the advent of Christ Jesus. Indeed we of today, looking back across the pages of history, may advisedly say the deeper purpose of that exodus and its educational experience was to prepare the human understanding for the coming of the Christ. Thus Jesus was born of the tribe of Judah. The desert wanderings, the conquest of Canaan; the long years of preparation, of defeats or triumphs, of alternate light and shadow; the ebb and flow of prophetic vision and fidelity to spiritual law, — all these were the travail of a great nation giving birth to the Messiah. The effort of evil to strangle, and the nature of good to prevail, continued until the veil was lifted and the Christ appeared; then Abraham's pilgrimage received its consummate reward. With the advent of Christ Jesus a new era began, revealing a brotherhood greater than the sons of Israel, a world-wide brotherhood, and a fatherhood more precious than that of Abraham, a heavenly Father of all, impartial in His love and universal in His embrace. Had it not been for the human disposition to dominate its fellow men, this brotherhood would have been established for all time and fully realized in the early Christian days; but cruelty and tyranny continued their persecutions to such an extent that it threatened, as did the famine in Egypt, to destroy again the seed of promise before the harvest could be realized in its full glory. With "truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne," what could the laborers in the vineyard do? What seemed to be the world's greatest need? Was it not for a country where truth could be cradled free from oppression, where men could love and serve God according to the dictates of their own conscience? Light and liberty have ever prospered hand in hand. Light cannot live without liberty, and as liberty begets light, so light demands liberty. The light of the gospels has never been put out, — it could not be, — and this immortal flame demanded and finally found a cradle of liberty. During the latter part of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth, many lovers of freedom and seekers of fortune colonized in America, but those who came for the specific purpose of worshiping God and serving Him in freedom and right were the Pilgrim fathers, who landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Mrs. Eddy says of them, "On shores of solitude, at Plymouth Rock, they planted a nation's heart, — the rights of conscience, imperishable glory" (Pulpit and Press, p. 10). Aspiration for a righteous liberty begets unity, hence the United States. We remember the blessing Jacob pronounced upon Joseph, upon him who was "separated from his brethren," upon whom God did send before his brethren "to preserve life." It is surely significant that as Christ Jesus was born of Israel, so Christian Science was discovered in America by a descendant of the Pilgrims. Mrs. Eddy was a descendant of those brave men and women who in 1620 planted their standard upon the rock-ribbed shores of New England. Like Abraham of old, they were forced to leave forever the cradle of their old beliefs and to push out, trusting God's protecting arm to guide them to a better shore. Like Abraham, they too could have returned to the land of their fathers had they desired an earthly habitation, but they declared that "they sought a city, that is to say an heavenly;" hence they did not return. They had learned the unwisdom of attempting to put "new wine into old bottles." Across the deeps their indomitable spirit led them, demanding freedom and broader skies, yearning for the peace that stretches out its arms alone to God. And God led them, prospering that inspired voyage and later crowning their successes with the final revelation of Christ in Christian Science. A mist of tenderness and gratitude unspeakable almost dims the page as we of the present time read these lines written by its pilgrim author nearly fifty years ago (Science and Health, p. 226): "I saw before me the sick, wearing out years of servitude to an unreal master in the belief that the body governed them, rather than Mind. The lame, the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the sick, the sensual, the sinner, I wished to save from the slavery of their own beliefs and from the educational systems of the Pharaohs, who today, as of yore, hold the children of Israel in bondage. I saw before me the awful conflict, the Red Sea and the wilderness; but I pressed on through faith in God, trusting Truth, the strong deliverer, to guide me into the land of Christian Science, where fetters fall and the rights of man are fully known and acknowledged." As portrayed in the nineteenth chapter of Revelation, St. John foresaw the fall of that great city Babylon, the representation of human tyranny, oppression, cruelty, greed, and persecution, and he foretells the glorious spectacle of a united world following the leadership of the Christ-idea, which he describes as follows: "And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. . . . And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God. . . . And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS." The revelator perceived the destiny of all nations and peoples united under the guidance of the one Mind, divine Love, and it is this power of God and His Christ that has been restored to us in Christian Science, the power which Jesus proved and commanded his followers to bring into manifestation, the healing and saving power which is our strength and comforter in every human need, even as Jesus said it would be. Christian Science makes pilgrims of us all; that is to say, it separates the tares from the wheat in individual consciousness, and is solving the problems of the nations by setting each individual to work to understand and to obey the supreme guidance of the one Mind. This will inevitably be followed by oneness of purpose, action, and desire on the part of all peoples and nations, singleness of devotion to Truth and Love, faithfulness to God and to their fellow men. Christian Science enables all to understand and heed the apostle's admonition, "Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light: which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy. Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul." We have seen that as two or more in a community are healed and reformed by Christian Science, others are encouraged and made braver and bolder to reach out for themselves and appropriate all God's bounteous gifts, — health, joy, harmony, purity, spirituality, understanding, and peace. This is the "glorious liberty of the children of God," and let us cherish no thought that would delay its realization. Longfellow says: — From eye to eye the signals run, From heart to heart the bright hope glows; The seekers of the Light are one. One in the freedom of the truth,
The Christian Science Journal, July, 1916 |
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