Article April 18, 1914 Issue

The Rock of Truth

GRACE SQUIRES

Possibly every Christian Scientist has at some time in his experience reached a period of calm when, instead of indulging the tendency to rest on his oars, he has been sufficiently wise to work with unremitting perseverance and trust. This course has begotten a sense of assurance which seemed entirely adequate; but when, as not infrequently happens, a sudden storm breaks out of the clear sky, the encounter proves to be peculiarly trying. Perhaps the anguish of such an hour is not half so much its own measure of evil, as is that shock to his trust which dissipated the sense of protection and justice and left him struggling with the doubt as to whether he had reaped the good he had tried to sow. In such an experience he may feel that he has not deserved it, and may try to solace his resentment with the mental resolve that he will make no more effort, since both ignorance and understanding, faithlessness and faith, seem to bring about the same result.

At least one Scientist has passed through this vortex. After months of peace and health, when his faith and love grew daily stronger, he was, at what seemed a most inopportune time, confronted with an experience that swept over him like a tidal wave. Though he clung to his faith while the tempest was on and successfully fought his way out, nevertheless when the skies cleared he suffered a mental recoil which carried his pain into weary months, until it seemed as if his faith was all gone. That he had won did not much matter. The point was, Why had he suffered at all? He had supposed that spiritual understanding averted just such blows; but this experience proved otherwise.

Since there was so little to gain, one might as well drift, he thought; and so he closed his books, laid them aside, and nursed a sense of injured indifference that did not bring him the sense of liberty which he had anticipated. At length, feeling the tension of this apathy unendurable, he cried out in his misery, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief." Mechanically picking up the Bible, he opened to the seventh chapter of Matthew. He had read it many times, though never with any special discernment, but in the spiritual light of that pleading prayer, its answer suddenly illumined his consciousness. "Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it."

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