Article May 21, 1921 Issue

Jacob's Ladder

ROBERT C. BRYANT

THE history of the Jewish people, from Abraham to Christ Jesus, is the record of the good influence of the spiritual idea upon individuals and the nation, as they dimly perceived this idea. In this history one may see revealed all the weakness and baseness of carnal human nature, but he may also catch glimpses of the great spiritual truth which had dawned upon many of the people; and the value of the record, and the secret of why it has lived through the centuries, lies not in the mere material history, but in the vision of reality which runs like a thread of gold through the narrative, rising at times to inspiring statements of truth, and again to wonderful demonstrations of the power of Mind over material belief.

The story of Jacob's ladder is an illustration of the way in which the spiritual idea came to one who was mesmerized by the worst forms of carnal belief. After his trickery and deceit, in an effort to gain some advantage by material means, Jacob was afraid of Esau his brother, and as he faced the future alone in a new land to which he was going, he must have been depressed by the remembrance of his dishonorable acts and with fear of the consequences of what he had done. As he lay on his stone pillow he dreamed of the ladder reaching from earth to heaven, on which the angels of God were ascending and descending.

Now all of the self-seeking and duplicity in Jacob's thought, as well as the fears which he entertained, were forms of error, mental suggestions of some reality apart from God, good; but the angels, as Mrs. Eddy says, in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 581), are "God's thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect; the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality, counteracting all evil, sensuality, and mortality." The meaning of Jacob's vision, as made clear in Christian Science, was that the only ideas that can really come to man must be the angels, God's thoughts; that the suggestions seeming to come from any other source than from God, must be purely supposititious, and have no reality. No ideas can really come from any other source than from Mind, God, and there is nothing in man that can entertain ideas but God's intelligent reflection. How much Jacob perceived this great truth we do not know, but he must have had some conception of it, for the process of regeneration, or casting out of error, was going on with him, and in a later experience with an angel he was renamed Israel, or, a prince with God.

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