THE LEADING OF LIGHT

John B. Willis

He was looking into the heart of a March sunset whose radiant glories were latticed by a group of leafless trees after a fashion that would have delighted the eye of an artist. Thought had been quickened to an aspiring glow, and as he stood with uncovered head there came out of the vanishing pink above him those cheerily familiar notes which are known to every nature lover as the call of the red-winged blackbird. Looking up, he saw a whole bevy of these happy harbingers of spring, headed straight for the sun which they so unfailingly follow year after year in their migrations between the river banks of the North and the everglades of the South. These feathered folk are true to the leading of light, and it is thus that they escape untempered airs and find that which conduces to the completeness and joy of their simple lives.

In all this they become our teachers; they tell us of the gain of loyalty to Truth, and that we shall find in its effulgence the fulness of life's true satisfactions. Were the birds unsupplied with a safe-guiding instinct, or were they disobedient to it, their welfare would not be conserved despite the richness of the sun's outpour, and this illustrates the significance to our well-being both of the faculty of spiritual perception and of glad conformity to its behests. These compass the deepest issues of human life, and the practical value of Christian Science inheres in the fact that as its teaching is assimilated we become more sensitive to the light of Truth and Love, and correspondingly more disposed to follow it.

The instinct for Truth, the power to recognize reality, is rightly thought of as the gift of God, but in most human experience it is an acquired possession, and this marks a vital distinction between human beings and other creatures. Without either intuition or experience the bees fashion their comb and the birds their nests, in the exhibition of a marvelous cleverness, an inexplicable insight, but though so wonderful, their capacity seems to have no freedom. It is confined to a definite and limited round of activity from which there is no departure, while human beings in contrast are able to discern and master a law which is capable of the widest application, and it is here that we come upon the basis of desert.

While some may seem indisposed to follow the light, though it is clearly seen, the many are honestly saying in their hearts, "Where is the way where the light dwelleth?" This is especially true today of Christian believers, vast numbers of whom long for that practical, satisfying apprehension of Truth to which they have not attained because of the mists of an educated false sense. Their instincts are good, but they are wanting in that knowledge of divine Principle which Christian Science supplies and because of which the word of prophecy is again being fulfilled, "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light."

Christ Jesus said, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." It is the irresistible attractiveness of the truth which he said we should "know" that explains the causal relation between the gaining of a right perception and the activity of a right impulse. What can explain the devotion with which the early disciples followed the light of Life but that demonstrable apprehension which, as Mrs. Eddy has said, is "Truth's prism and praise," and which is indeed "a light above the sun" (Science and Health, p. 558). The stubborn and the unbalanced may try to resist the authority of a proved proposition, but like the pole-star it quietly holds its place, and by it the one-time-wayward, when they have suffered sufficiently, are sure to find their way.

To link men to God by making His justice and beauty known, and thus to awaken a devotion and enlist a service which is marked by instinctive abandon and perennial joy—this is the end and achievement of Christian Science. It brings into human experience the fulfilment of the word of the Lord spoken by Isaiah, "The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory."

John B. Willis.

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