Editorial November 12, 1910 Issue

THE DARING OF LIGHT

John B. Willis

He was a very fair-meaning fellow, but an inherited bent, as it was said, plus certain events in the way of class honors, accepted articles, etc., had given him an estimate of the value of his own opinions which had something of the finality-flavor of a supreme court decision. To please a friend whose hospitality he was enjoying, he had consented to read a chapter in Science and Health, and having reached the second page he tossed it into a corner with the remark, that "for unalloyed presumption that book could easily beat the band." "Yes," added his friend, "it has the daring of light."

Nothing more was said at the time, but some months later, in an hour of mental struggle when he felt that everything was slipping away from him, the comparison was recalled and the book was again opened. Its supreme assurance impressed him as before, but the effect was not at all the same, and for the reason that he found it so surprisingly reasonable, while the definite affirmative tone answered well to his own sense of uncertainty and need. It had the restful quality of the mathematician's expression of numerical relations, or the chemist's statement of molecular reactions. The positiveness of the positions taken interested him, and he read on,—read himself, to his astonishment, into a consciousness of relief. He had entered the society of one person who was sure of things because she had demonstrated her proposition! The curtain had been raised a bit for him, and light entered.

He began to see that the statements of the book kept fast hold upon certain fundamentals of thought to which he could make no protest; that they were logically linked to basic fact, so that its decisive quality was communicated to them. He perceived that the recognition of the ideal nature and immutable integrity of God involves the recognition of the ideality of His manifestations, His universe, and His man; that no disharmony has any real being or place—it is but the fabrication of falsity, the darkness of human sense which the light of Truth must dispel, and that while opposites may seem to be very near each other, they never clasp hands.

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