Editorial May 8, 1909 Issue

THE HOLY CITY

Annie M. Knott

In reading the 21st chapter of Revelation, we are reminded that many nations have had a "holy city," around which centered their patriotism, their chivalry, and, alas, in some instances their superstition and intolerance. None the less, the best and purest aspirations of the human heart have ever clung to the hope of an ideal city, to be realized, perchance, at some distant day, and the Revelator responds to this desire, this mute prayer of the ages, when he speaks in no uncertain terms of the coming of this city down to men. Strangely enough, despite this prophecy, people have been taught to believe that they must die and go out into the unknown in order to find the "holy city;" but this is not what the Bible teaches at all, for we are told therein that St. John, nearly two thousand years ago, saw the ideal city "coming down from God." Now this was undoubtedly a spiritual fact, but how wonderfully it fits in with human need! We are told of the passing of all sorrow, sickness, sin, and death before the light and glory of the divine presence; of the fountain of the water of life, and of the destruction of all evil in the consuming fire of divine Love.

John called his ideal city "the new Jerusalem," and well he might, for Jerusalem had been for long years a city of high and holy hopes, yet it was of this city that Jesus said. after it had rejected the healing truth which he came to offer the world: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, ... Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord," Jesus himself wept over Mt. Zion, but it was there that he "proved Life to be deathless and Love to be the master of hate," to use Mrs. Eddy's words (Science and Health, p. 44). John at length came to understand this great victory, and so he was ready to see the "holy city,"—a city redeemed from sin, disease, and death.

Professor Drummond has said that "one Christian city, one city in any part of the earth, whose citizens from the greatest to the humblest lived in the spirit of Christ, where religion had overflowed the churches and passed into the streets, inundating every house and workshop, and permeating the whole social and commercial life,—one such Christian city would seal the redemption of the whole world." He also said that the first object of Christ, as a social reformer, "was to provide the world with better men." If we are to follow the Master's example, we must begin as he did, and as he taught his followers to begin their work, namely, by casting out devils (evils). The "holy city" did not appear till "the former things," the evil things, had passed away. To the darkened human sense there was sorrow, pain, and death, but these vanished, as the truth was understood, and the heaven and earth of God's creating appeared to St. John in the sunlight of Truth and Love.

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