Editorial November 27, 1920 Issue

Daniel

Frederick Dixon

The great characteristic of Daniel was his ability to stand alone, which really is the measure of his moral courage. "Moral courage," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 514 of Science and Health, "is 'the lion of the tribe of Juda,' the king of the mental realm." What exactly this means Daniel must have discovered long before he entered the den of Darius' lions, or, indeed, he never would have reached its threshold. The antithesis of the mentality of Daniel is the mentality of the mob. The mob finds its courage in the mesmerism of numbers: break the mesmerism, and it fades away, under your very eyes, like the smile of the Cheshire cat. To the man in the street the phenomenon is a more or less perplexing one: to the metaphysician it is as simple as the reasoning of Euclid. The mob, in a sentence, is of the earth earthy; it has set its heart upon carnal things; and its mentality is that of the materialist, instinct with fear, which is the belief that there is life, substance, and intelligence in matter.

The metaphysician, on the other hand, has made the momentous discovery of the absolute unreality of matter. From that moment it has become the business of his life to demonstrate this; and, in proportion as he makes good his demonstration, he necessarily ceases to believe in matter, and so parts company with fear. That is the lesson the wise men of the East strove to convey through the story of Daniel and that of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, as a matter of fact from the beginning of the Bible to the end. It is the lesson of the evolution of the knowledge of God, the understanding of Principle, in the human consciousness. As the understanding of Principle becomes clearer and clearer to a man, the unreality of matter necessarily becomes more and more obvious. With the broadening of this understanding, fear vanishes. If, that is to say, a man, by obedience to Principle, can make bread out of stones, can multiply one loaf into thousands, what becomes of the fear of starvation? If he can find the tribute money in a fish's mouth, where is the dread of poverty? If sickness can be healed and the dead raised, then the victory of the grave is abolished. The student, in short, as all this is revealed to him, finds a new and a wonderful meaning in those words of Paul, written to the church in Rome, "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Life is, indeed, something very far removed from any belief of the flesh. Mrs. Eddy puts this with extraordinary vividness on page 75 of Science and Health, where she writes, "Jesus restored Lazarus by the understanding that Lazarus had never died, not by an admission that his body had died and then lived again. Had Jesus believed that Lazarus had lived or died in his body, the Master would have stood on the same plane of belief as those who buried the body, and he could not have resuscitated it." Neither life, then, nor death can separate man from Principle, for man is the spiritual reflection of Principle, the image and likeness of God. The physical life of a man, on the other hand, with its sensuous passions and pleasures, the physical death of a man with its intense surrender to the belief of reality of matter, are simply phases of the belief of life in matter, that that life can be lost, and as such are mere counterfeits of Principle.

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