Article June 12, 1920 Issue

Light

ROSE N. SUTRO

JUST as the flowers and all nature turn to the light and sunshine, sometimes through the stoniest crevices, so does a man seek good. Sometimes through the greatest tribulations, sorrow, or sickness he seeks God, good, in whose light he, as image and likeness, lives and moves and has his being. Throughout the Scriptures light has been used as the symbol of spiritual understanding, just as its supposititious opposite, darkness, has always typified ignorance and materiality. Beginning with Genesis 1:3, "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light," we find that wherever the light appears it is the end of the darkness. Whenever a truth is apprehended it is through understanding, which is an end to ignorance. That is just as true of metaphysics as it is of light and darkness or of mathematics. When we have learned that twice two is four, we are not concerned as to what has become of the error in our mathematical problem where twice two may have been admitted to be five or three; nor when our room is flooded with sunshine are we disturbed to discover what has become of the darkness that seemed to envelop us before the shades were drawn up. In like manner, when we learn that man in the image and likeness of God is all the man there is, there need be no concern as to what becomes of the material or mortal sense of man that we have hitherto admitted to be man.

On page 485 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy says, "Emerge gently from matter into Spirit." Can one go from the darkness of night to the full radiance of noontide glory without going through the transitional period of dawn and rising sun? We soon learn in the study of Christian Science that patience must have "her perfect work," and Mrs. Eddy says on page 407 of Science and Health: "Let the perfect model be present in your thoughts instead of its demoralized opposite. This spiritualization of thought lets in the light, and brings the divine Mind, Life not death, into your consciousness."

When a problem presents itself to a Christian Scientist for solution, what does he do? He does not inquire as to where the error or darkness comes from; he knows that wherever a false or mortal sense of things presents itself to his thought, "Science reverses the false testimony of the physical senses, and by this reversal mortals arrive at the fundamental facts of being" (Science and Health, p. 120). Thus, right where the lie appears to be, right there actually is the truth that the lie is lying about. Instead of darkness there is light, instead of death there is Life, instead of inharmony there is harmony, and so on and on; always always there is a spiritual fact instead of a material counterfeit.

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