Article July 3, 1920 Issue

The Rod of God

HELEN M. INMAN

ON page 288 of Miscellany, Mrs. Eddy says: "Love atones for sin through love that destroys sin. His rod is love." In those two sentences, in the briefest way she removes that human concept of love which calls for fair seeming at any price. The consciousness of Love as Principle is that light "which lighteth every man that cometh into world," that light which, focused into ideas, brings about such clash of forces as the age is able to bear, resulting in the survival of the fittest—the spiritual element in every situation. That which really is, antedates mortality—the material world, sin, sickness, and death. True consciousness is the "I am" in Jesus' statement, "Before Abraham was, I am." It motived the uplifting of the rod of God by Moses on that hill from the summit of which he beheld the battle field of Rephidim. Smith's Bible Dictionary especially draws attention to the fact that it was not, as often stated, in order to enable Moses to hold up his hands in prayer all through the day of battle, that Aaron, Israel's first high priest, and Hur went up the hill in support of Moses, but that the rod of God might continue aloft until material sense had vanished into darkness, nothingness.

The Israelites' battle with Amalek on the plain of Rephidim as recorded in Deuteronomy is prophetic of that warfare between the ever unfolding idea of God and the pretense to consciousness or intelligence which claims an opposite to infinite Mind, the one God. In this warfare which to a rudderless human sense seems only evil continually, the mortal is tempted to make use of human ways and means to redeem a situation, to the extent of its lawlessness, devoid of every element of reality. Possibly no passage in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" is more often quoted than that in the chapter entitled "Science of Being" and in the paragraph which defines the "uses of suffering" (p. 322), in which Mary Baker Eddy carries the student to the contemplation of "a bright outlook" (margin), even to the disappearance of limitation imposed by the human concept. On page 21 of "No and Yes," she writes, "Divine philosophy is demonstrably the true idea of the Christ, wherein Principle heals and saves." Thus it is that having accepted the I or Ego as God, of whom man is the conscious identity, immortality becomes understood as the status of being. The metaphysics of the divine Mind reveals—at the very point of acceptance—the activity of love as the infinite expression of the infinite Mind. Love as idea can only be deduced from that of which it is the expression. Divine Principle being the only cause there is, expression or effect is recognized as infinitely right, infinitely active, infinitely available. This idea appears, to anything claiming existence out of Principle, as the rod of God, the inspiration operating when "Jesus stormed sin in its citadels and kept peace with God" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 211). It is the healing presence of Truth and Love which supplies that truth which, in its reflection of Principle, clarifies every situation to which it is applied, and that love which, as the expression of Principle, can know nothing unlike itself, the one consciousness, God, good.

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