Article November 27, 1920 Issue

Stars

MILLICENT L. SEARS

The stars for many years have attracted me. As long ago as 1900 I began to study astronomy by myself until I became familiar with the names and movements of the majority of the stars and constellations, and was groping for some meaning in the great spaces beyond them. It was not astronomy, however, but Christian Science, which taught me to look through them and beyond them, and to recognize the Principle of the universe, the infinite power which held the wind in His grasp and controlled the sweet influence of the Pleiades and governed Arcturus with his sons. Then the material universe and celestial bodies became only a faint symbol of the spiritual universe of God's creating, even as Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 240), "Arctic regions, sunny tropics, giant hills, winged winds, mighty billows, verdant vales, festive flowers, and glorious heavens,—all point to Mind, the spiritual intelligence they reflect."

About a year ago I read in The Christian Science Monitor an article on astronomy which described a star that appeared in 1901 as a nova, or new star, but which was known to have existed before and which could plainly be located now. Careful calculations reported that its distance from the earth was so great that it took three hundred and fifty years for its light to reach us, so that it had really appeared in 1656 as we saw it in 1906. The study of this star was like a vivid illustration of the history of that spiritual star of Truth whose effulgent light this century is beginning to enjoy. The light and warmth and healing of God, good, has always been in existence, but the world was not conscious of it in definite form until "the wakeful shepherds" of whom Mrs. Eddy speaks on page vii of the Preface to Science and Health, beheld "the first faint morning beams" which led to the Bethlehem babe "who would make plain to benighted understanding the way of salvation." To quote the passage in full: "The wakeful shepherd beholds the first faint morning beams, ere cometh the full radiance of a risen day. So shone the pale star to the prophet-shepherds; yet it traversed the night, and came where, in cradled obscurity, lay the Bethlehem babe, the human herald of Christ, Truth, who would make plain to benighted understanding the way of salvation through Christ Jesus, till across a night of error should dawn the morning beams and shine the guiding star of being. The Wisemen were led to behold and to follow this daystar of divine Science, lighting the way to eternal harmony."

The spiritual light shone upon a waiting world and brought health and healing in its path. For three hundred years, so history tells us, this healing of all manner of sickness and all manner of disease was a concomitant of Christianity, an essential element, a natural proof of its genuineness. Then came the temporary eclipse of this light, and for centuries the eyes of the world were blinded and they did not perceive the truth. It was in the world, but the world knew it not. Then, like the star which reappeared in our celestial heavens after many years of darkness, this light of Truth was one day rediscovered, and a faithful searcher of the spiritual heavens caught with her penetrating gaze the sight of that lost element of Christian healing. Just as the nova was first found by one scanning the skies who had studied and known all the stars that were regularly visible in the sky and so could quickly recognize the new, so was the return of that light which Jesus had once before pointed out to the world recognized, in her own healing through prayer, by Mrs. Eddy, who had been studying life with the Bible as her chart, and had sounded the depths of prevalent theories.

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