Article November 5, 1910 Issue

CAPTIVITY LED CAPTIVE

HELEN E. FOWLER.

In the book of Isaiah we read: "Thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian." This text brought home to the writer a fuller sense of the freedom which Jesus Christ gave to mankind by the triumph won in his first recorded struggle with evil, in the wilderness. The forty days of silent communion and preparation were followed by the temptation of physical weakness, in which the human sense was brought face to face with hunger,—one of the material beliefs which has bound the Adam-race with more seeming power than almost any other. Up to that time the belief had held undisputed sway over mortals that life was dependent upon material sustenance and could not exist without it.

We cannot doubt that Jesus must have realized the full significance of the problem which confronted him, and resolved to work it out in a purely spiritual way. This loyalty to the highest possible demonstration of real being enabled him to turn from the lower demonstration suggested by the physical sense of immediate need. It would perhaps have been easy for him to turn the stones into bread and thus satisfy a seemingly natural craving; but although this might have sufficed to prove the measure of his spiritual understanding to a large extent, it would not have established the true sense of being, and its absolute independence of matter, which would still remain for him to prove, and which must be proved before he could arrive at the conviction which might declare, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." At the outset of his public ministry, he thus showed his readiness to sacrifice to the utmost the material sense of selfhood, and the belief in material causation thereby implied, in order to prove conclusively the absolute fatherhood of Spirit—the divine Mind—as the sole cause, sustenance, and substance of man.

It was on this rock of true being that Jesus built his whole three years' demonstration, until he reached that coping-stone of ascension described in the book of the Revelation, where consciousness is entirely spiritual. "I saw no temple therein," St. John writes; and our text-book, Science and Health, on page 576, points out the meaning of this vision of the divine creation in the following words: "The Revelator was familiar with Jesus' use of this word, as when Jesus spoke of his material body as the temple to be temporarily rebuilt (John ii. 21). What further indication need we of the real man's incorporeality than this, that John saw heaven and earth with 'no temple [body] therein'?" It was this spiritual idea of selfhood which dominated and determined the motives and actions of Jesus the Christ. The perfect method which he employed in the solving of this problem set a standard which all professing Christians should strive to follow. His carefulness in demonstrating his loyalty to his knowledge of right, which refused to be diverted from its direct course by the plausibility of error's plea, are, indeed, an example full of warning to all who wish to obey his commands.

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CAPTIVITY LED CAPTIVE

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