Article March 9, 1907 Issue

A SCIENTIFIC TRUTH ILLUSTRATED

REV. JESSE L. FONDA

The illusive nature of sense testimony is illustrated in the following incidents: One morning a man was driving a cow into the stable, in which there happened to be at the time considerable dust. As a ray of sunshine streamed through a knot-hole and hit the particles of dust, it made them all visible and there seemed to be a veritable bar across the way, which was so real to the cow that as she hurried along she jumped over it to get to her place. A friend recently told me this experience of a neighbor. Coming home one night he was laughing heartily. His wife asked the cause, and he told her that for two or three evenings he had been stepping very carefully over what seemed a crack in the cement sidewalk. This evening he had for some reason looked at it carefully, and found that it was no crack at all but the shadow of a wire overhead.

In both these instances there was no reality involved, only a seeming; a veritable shadow, perhaps, but no substance. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, we learn that the same is true of all that is based upon sense testimony. We have all been living in the sense that the body is real and the only thing that we can live in; and to material sense this is the only possible consciousness of existence. Mrs. Eddy is the only one who has had the courage to attempt to disabuse the thought of the world on this point. She discovered and proclaimed that the body and material sense are not the realities of being, but are the errors and falsities of human thought; and that the spiritual, the divine, is the only reality of being. Others may have gained a glimpse of these facts, but she studied them out, gave them a philosophical analysis, and set them in logical sequence and in scientific form. She has given to the world the results of her work in language fitting to the originality and grandeur of the subject, and we have it in our text-book as "apples of gold in pictures of silver." Here we are shown that while mortals continue in this false sense, they take the sins, pains, and sorrows that necessarily inbere in it, and accept them as real and essential. They step over shadows and bars and make sorry work of it.

The method of getting out of this bondage is learned from the case of the man and the shadow. One must first understand the unreal nature of these ills,—these shadows and bars,—and with the apprehension of Science this is now possible. We can know surely that disease is a false condition, hence unreal, and when this is perceived the supposed power of falsity vanishes and its hold is broken. In the sunlight of Truth we are assured of its illusiveness. Some may say that it is not quite so easy to gain the sense of victory over sin and sickness as it was in the case of the one who learned of the shadow. There is in mortal thought a distinct insistence upon the reality of these evils which requires a positive and persistent denial and refutation. We must, therefore, know that there is a power in our denials to overcome every false claim of power; that the eternal Christ-power, with its supreme denial and destruction of evil, is with us, and that "the everlasting arms" sustain us. We should thus be filled with confidence in the adequacy of Truth and then evil would soon vanish and harmony be restored.

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A SCIENTIFIC TRUTH ILLUSTRATED

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