Article December 4, 1909 Issue

THE CLOUDS OF SENSE

STELLA E. SAXTON.

It was on a high mountain slope in Switzerland, above Lake Geneva. About us was unrolled the marvelous panorama of the Alps, the "long, wide lake below." But it was a gray day; the water was dull and ashen, a gloom rested on earth and sky. Suddenly, as we looked down, a little circle on the water flashed like an opal afloat—a shaft of light had touched the lake. As the eye followed it up through a breaking cloud to a tiny patch of blue sky, we understood the gleaming disc below; and as the clouds broke more and more, as the patch of cleared sky grew wider and wider, the ripples on the lake reflected back the light above them in ever increasing space, the hills took on a vivid green, and soon the whole country was glorious with colorful beauty. Here was our lesson in reflection. When clouds of error are as a veil before our mental vision, everything in life seems dulled by them; but as one shaft after another of spiritual light drives them away, larger and larger grows our consciousness of Truth, there is less and less of obstruction in the way, till finally the whole glorious brightness of the life that reflects God and God only is ours.

A few days later we entered Lucerne to find it wrapped in a blanket of obscurity. To the human eye it seemed but a flat, uninteresting prospect, its boundaries hidden by mist, not one single evidence of the wonderful city it was to be when the clouds lifted. Yet we had been told that travelers wait hours, days, weeks even, for this happy event, and we were willing to linger and trust. It was morning when we reached the place, and suddenly, about three in the afternoon, an emerald slope emerged from the fog, as if thrust through a flimsy curtain; then another and another, each with drifting banners of mist about them, which gradually melted and swirled away, driven by the whip of the sun, till peak after peak stood sculptured against the blue sky, some veiled in purple haze, some snow-crowned; the whole presenting a view so marvelous, and revealing Lucerne such an entrancing jewel of a city, that we fairly trembled to think what we would have missed had we believed the evidence of human sight in that early morning and gone on our way.

Again the lesson was borne to us of how like this the mental journey into Christian Science has been. Truth has always been Truth, the same yesterday, today, and forever. There have been those who have reached the exalted vision and told us of its glory, and some have believed, while others went their way indifferent or incredulous. Through long ages mortal mind has been piling up the dense black clouds which have obscured the City Beautiful—clouds made up of beliefs in other powers, of false religious, false philosophy, false pleasures, and their attendant pains, sin, sickness, death, the endless string of individtial errors that make for separation from God—till, as it seemed, the mass was impenetrable. Then in this age came one whose thought was so piercingly pure that it smote through the blackness; the whole mass broke away, and once more the wonderful heights of spiritual attainment were revealed.

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