Article December 29, 1917 Issue

"Thine only son"

DELAVAN ROSS MOORE

In the twenty-second chapter of Genesis it is recorded that God tempted Abraham and commanded him to take Issac, his only son, and offer him for a burnt offering. At the crucial moment an angel of the Lord stayed the hand of the patriarch and forbade the consummation of the act on the ground that his fidelity could no longer be questioned, in that he had not withheld even this supreme sacrifice.

To the Christian Scientist this incident constitutes an interesting and instructive lesson. A superficial and literal reading is, of course, unsatisfactory, and such reading would miss the great lesson; indeed, any interpretation which varies from the scientific understanding of God and the divine idea must needs be rejected by the student of Christian Science. Abraham had been commanded, it will be remembered, to get out from his country and from among his kindred unto a land that God was to show him. Considered historically, this country was Chaldea, the land of superstition, stargazing, necromancy, and idolatry; metaphysically, it was the consciousness of so-called mortal mind, the false belief of life in matter,—polytheistic confusion. The land which the patriarch sought is plainly the realm of Soul, of reality, "a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God."

It is evident from the many incidents of Abraham's career, as recorded in the book of Genesis, that this true and enlightened understanding was not reached in a moment, but was necessarily a product of spiritual growth. Its analogy is found in the lives of truth seekers throughout all ages, as witness Moses, who abode forty years in the desert of Midian, slowly unfolding into the consciousness of eternal realities as he recognized the utter emptiness of the "wisdom of the Egyptians;" and then for forty other years this same Moses, by virtue of his enlightened understanding of the truth of being, leading a nation out of mental bondage into spiritual freedom. In Abraham's case this pilgrimage from material beliefs to spiritual understanding may be said to be summed up in the narrative of the sacrificial offering up of Isaac.

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