Article October 21, 1911 Issue

THE CITY

ALICE HALE COHEN

Recently it came into my experience to travel through many cities in a short space of time, each day finding me confronted by some new condition as I moved rapidly from place to place. One day it would be excessively hot with clouds of desert dust obscuring the horizon. The next day, as a higher altitude was reached, the night air would be sharp and cold. All of these conditions, passing in rapid review, and claiming to injure or to bless, seemed a very Babel of confusion. Through acceptance of the testimony of the material senses, a material universe with its so-called laws was acknowledged, and physical conditions arose in conjunction with these laws. This tended to darken thought still further, and I at length awakened to find myself dwelling mentally in a series of cities hid deep in the obscurity of the valley, instead of in the one city set on the hill of exalted thought.

At length, discerning that I had been traveling over the hard road of the physical senses, I took refuge in the understanding of spiritual creation, and found myself in the holy city of our God, wholly good and undivided, inseparable from government according to God's law. Gratefully taking up the task of dematerializing and spiritualizing thought, and strengthened by many passages from the Bible and "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," I discerned, instead of a succession of changes from one belief to another, the true succession of the unfolding of spiritual ideas. The city of the great King was revealed, and in its light, the light of unbroken reality, the ghostly cities of sense began to fade, even as a mirage, which for all its claim of closely counterfeiting reality cannot deceive those who know what really occupies the place it appears to usurp.

The real city discovered, the next question which arose was how to dwell therein here and now. Again turning from the material to the spiritual sense of creation, it was perceived that man dwells not in houses made with hands, but in the consciousness of God, good. Then, this being the case, when confronted by the enemies which besiege our city,— the armies of material thoughts trying through specious arguments to lead us to stray from our rightful habitation of spiritual consciousness, — we have only to abide steadfastly in good, to continue unabated and uninterrupted in our obedience to the First Commandment, to detect a path to be avoided in every suggestion which would seek to divide the most High ... under the shadow of the Almighty," was seen to be the quiet habitation wherein there be the quiet habitation wherein there need be no stress nor struggle to abide; that the only stress and struggle arises from the endeavor to abide in the dream cities of sense, wherein is no real substance, no real foothold, no real foundation, nothing on which to stand.

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