Article August 7, 1915 Issue

Christian Science Reading-rooms

OLIVE P. SIMCOX

The twenty-first chapter of Revelation is one of the most inspiring chapters in the whole Bible, describing as it does the "new Jerusalem," which metaphysically interpreted stands for the perfect spiritual consciousness. We learn in Christian Science that it is only as we gain this perfect consciousness that we make any real progress. Our effort as students is to lift our thought above material phenomena and to learn that all cause and effect are mental.

Many years ago, when the writer was a very young student of Christian Science, she had an experience in a reading-room which is still shedding light upon her daily life. The room was maintained by a small church, the membership of which was composed mostly of young people, and all of them young in Christian Science. Few of the workers had really grown to the positions they were filling, but the church was doing the best it could with the means at hand. The writer was chairman of the reading-room committee, assigning different members for the various afternoons, ordering literature, and caring for the rooms generally. If for any reason the appointee could not serve, it was the chairman's duty either to get a substitute or to fill the vacancy herself.

On this special afternoon no one could be found to fill a vacancy, so it fell to the chairman to go to the reading-room. As preparations had been made to attend a party and a particularly pleasant afternoon had been planned, she was not at all pleased to give it up; in fact, she went to the room in anything but the proper frame of mind, and I am afraid she fretted quite a while in a dusty, disorderly room. Presently the voice of Truth, clearer than it had ever before been heard, told her that she whose duty it was to care for it, should be ashamed to look at the untidy room. Suppose the Master should walk in? Then in a moment came the clear conviction that Christ, Truth, was already there, that here was the manger where the Christ-idea is born to the receptive consciousness. Finally the Scientist rolled up her sleeves and went to work, literally and mentally; and she has tried ever since to keep her thought free from the dust of materiality.

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