Article January 11, 1919 Issue

It is related in the book of Exodus that, when the plague...

The Christian Science Monitor

It is related in the book of Exodus that, when the plague of darkness fell upon Egypt, "all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings." This light, as the Scriptures indicate, was the effect of spiritual perception which lightened a people struggling to free themselves from the domination of materialism. Ever since God created the light and divided the light from the darkness, the human endeavor to make separation between materialism and spirituality has invariably resulted in a truer knowledge of God, and, in many instances, this spiritual illumination became visibly appreciable as light.

When Moses came down from the mount where, face to face with spiritual reality, he had been freed from materiality, he "wist not that the skin of his face shone." Centuries later, on the mount of transfiguration, this same light of divine Mind visibly enveloped Christ Jesus and also revealed the identity of Moses and Elias. It was the perception of spiritual being that had previously inspired Jesus, in the midst of the feast in the temple at Jerusalem, to declare of the Christ, "I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." It was the understanding of the Christ, or Truth, that flooded the disciples with light on the Pentecostal day, and, not long afterwards, so remarkably illumined the consciousness of Paul on the Damascus road. It was, of course, nothing but this spiritual understanding that wrought the healing of sin, disease, and death during the first few centuries of the Christian era; and, obviously, it was the waning light of understanding that caused these works to cease, and left the world to record, in the oncoming Dark Ages, the workings of the human mind which chose the darkness of materialism rather than the light of Christ and the consequent struggle to overcome the lust of the flesh.

In the present age the irradiance of spiritual life has again overtaken the night of materialism and, through Mrs. Eddy's discovery and her subsequent writings, spiritual consciousness and understanding with all their pristine power to overcome the beliefs of materialism have been proved to be a present possibility. After Mrs. Eddy's own healing, through her illuminated understanding of a Scriptural text, she began a systematic search for the Science of the Christ, which she knew must be contained in the Bible. "The Scriptures were illumined," she writes on page 110 of Science and Health; "reason and revelation were reconciled, and afterwards the truth of Christian Science was demonstrated."

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