Article November 1, 1913 Issue

Knowing the Truth

FLORENCE E. B. DONALDSON

Christian Science demands of its students that they shall know the truth of being as demonstrable fact, and not merely speculate on or theorize about things pertaining to God. The psalmist understood this when, echoing the words of Moses, he sang: "Know ye that the Lord he is God." In the Preface to "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy writes: "Ignorance of God is no longer the stepping-stone to faith. The only guarantee of obedience is a right apprehension of Him whom to know aright is Life eternal" (p. vii). As we grow in the understanding of the one Mind, we see that all true knowledge is in God, and therefore it is only as we reflect good that we are conscious channels for those real and true thoughts which are indeed "verities."

Science reveals the fact that belief in the suppositious fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a transgression of divine law, which results in the further belief in the reality of sin, sickness, and death. The first step out of this mist of false sense is taken when, drawn by Truth, we look up, and then recognize that the error we have hitherto believed real, is indeed error, illusion, nothingness. When Moses bade the Israelites who were suffering from serpent bites to look up at the brazen serpent, he was leading them, in obedience to divine command, to look away from the error; and the presentation of that which was not only harmless but typical of wisdom, ousted from thought the fear of the poisonous vipers, whereupon the people were healed through their awakened sense of God's protecting care. We need to see clearly that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a product of mortal mind, arising from the mist which claims to cloud our thought, and is as erroneous as its phantom fruits, which must be seen as nothingness, powerless to tempt or to destroy.

The unreality of evil is necessarily difficult of comprehension to suffering sense; but the honest perusal of our text-book, with its reiterated statements and explanations of the illusion of sickness, compel the beginner to look at fleshly ills from a different view-point, and it not infrequently happens that healing comes with the dawing hope that, as disease has arrogated to itself the right to impose penalties, these may be set at naught as God's law is understood and obeyed. In the light of our Leader's teaching on this point, we see clearly that from cover to cover the Bible shows sickness to be but the outcome of the Adam-dream, and as Christ Jesus demonstrated to his disciples for all time, it is no part of God's creation and cannot continue to be manifested when the realization of the true image and likeness eliminates the human fear of disease. It is helpful to note that not only did Jesus, and some of the prophets, prove the nothingness of the false claims of death, but that the verse of the psalmist's song which ecclesiastical theology has utilized as specially applicable to the human sense of death, really describes the supposed abode of the "king of terrors" as "the valley of the shadow [the illusion] of death;" and this is essentially the teaching of Christian Science.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

Knowing the Truth

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access