Article July 13, 1918 Issue

Lessons from a Mirage

CHARLES C. BOYNTON

One afternoon when I was motoring in the San Joaquin valley in California with two of my young sons, our attention was drawn to what seemed to be a great body of water covering the road ahead and extending over a wide stretch of country on both sides of it. We viewed the phenomenon with interest. Although to the senses we were impassably cut off from our home, the boys felt no fear, as they had previously had experiences with a mirage, and knew that in such experiences all that it is necessary to do is to keep right on, just as if the mirage were not there, and that it would vanish on our approach.

The experience had, however, a deeper significance for me. I knew that the appearance was merely an illusion, but I also knew that Christian Science proclaims all material appearances to be illusions, because they are the reverse of spiritual reality. My train of thought was somewhat as follows: Jesus gave us the rule by which we are to obtain our freedom from all illusions; it is for us to know the truth,—and the promise is that the truth will make us free. Make us free how? By destroying our belief in the material illusion; by healing us of our false sense. We all know that a mirage is an illusion; we know this absolutely. We do not have to work to realize this. Then, it may be asked, why does it not disappear? In this case I was realizing with great certainty of conviction that the mirage was an illusion, a false sense; but there it was, just as real to my senses as when I first saw it. Then personal sense argued, If you cannot handle something which you know with all your heart and soul to be an illusion, what hope have you ever to handle claims of evil, of sickness, of misfortune, which for so many years you have regarded as real, and which mortal sense and physical experience have always conceded to be very real, and often terrible indeed?

While this train of thought was taking my attention, we had been driving rapidly ahead, and I suddenly realized that we had arrived at a place where the mirage had seemed to be when our attention was first attracted to it, but the mirage had retreated before us as we proceeded, and was still the same relative distance in advance of us. Then there came to me an added significance to Jesus' promise that we should be free. I could not say that there was anything in the presence of that mirage which had power to limit my freedom. My faith that a clear road was ahead was not dimmed. I had not stopped on my journey on account of the mirage, nor turned aside in an endeavor to go several miles around this seemingly impassable body of water which my eyes told me was spread out over the country into which our road directly led. I had in no manner been troubled or inconvenienced. As a matter of fact the apparition was, if anything, an interesting experience, for the reason that I knew it to be an apparition which, though temporarily obscuring the road ahead, would nevertheless move on or vanish as we approached. Then could I not say I was free,—free in the knowledge of the nothingness of the apparition, and the consequent faith in the unobstructed continuity of the road ahead?

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