Editorial February 7, 1914 Issue

Truth's Sufficiency

John B. Willis

To those who in fancied security looked down from the walls of Jericho, the strange doings of the undrilled, unmunitioned host of Israel must have seemed the folly of fools. Nevertheless there was an ominously patient persistence in their madness which surely gave pause to the ridicule of any who had seen the waters of the Jordan mount up, a great arrested flood, that this motley multitude might pass through.

Doubtless there was not a little laughter by the boastful and contemptuous, and many a derisive cry hurled from the parapets during this spectacular and seemingly insane performance, but at the end of the seventh day, when, as we are told, the walls "fell down flat" when "the priests blew with the trumpets," and the children of Israel "shouted with a great shout," then there was manifest the adequacy of that silent, unseen force whose power over the fortresses of materiality was revealed to the Israel of a later day in the healing of all manner of diseases by the hand of a gentler Joshua. This is the lesson of Jericho, and of every other overcoming of the strongholds of false sense, even the embittered prejudices that were banished for Saul "at midday" on his way to Damascus, the long-indulged sensualities that gave place through prayer in the hour of Augustine's mental agony, and the contented belief in pills and poultices which in this our time is rapidly yielding to the demonstration of the healing power of spiritual understanding in Christian Science.

Our immediate problem may not have the dimensions of a walled city, but if any least hindrance to our spiritual advance is removed, it will be by the same reliance upon the divine sufficiency which made the conquest of Joshua so irresistible. The acquisition of the habit of thus trusting Truth alone, is no less imperative than unusual, but happily in demonstrable Science this is not difficult. When in his experiments the chemist has demonstrated the unvarying certainty of a given reaction under given conditions, he notes the discovered order as a law upon which all chemists in all time can place a firm reliance. It becomes for him a fixed factor of consciousness, a truth which he can never question. Being scientific, the process of discovery is entirely satisfying. He has been awakened to another right idea, which he recognizes as invaluable because immutable and forever at command. This gives that sense of achievement and of expanding powers without which there is no freedom or joy, no true living. With the repetition of such experiences he becomes an enthusiastic and successful investigator, the insatiable seeker for that scientific truth which he thinks of as omnipresent, authoritative, final, and he is sure that if he becomes sufficiently acquainted with it, there is no chemical problem which he cannot solve.

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