Editorial December 16, 1922 Issue

The Mount of Revelation

Duncan Sinclair

Paul was speaking from the mount of revelation when he wrote to the Galatians: "But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ." The persecutor of the first Christians, he who had stood by consenting to the stoning to death of the saintly Stephen, undoubtedly thoroughly convinced as to the rightness of the action, did not reason himself by the logic of the so-called human mind into the acceptance of the truth which had been given to mankind through the revelation of Christ Jesus. The truth about real being came to him, through the power and with all the dazzling brightness of inspiration, on the way to Damascus.

A miracle! some may say. Yes, indeed; it was marvelous to human sense, but supremely natural when considered from the point of view of the activity of spiritual law. Whatever Paul may have been when he persecuted the early converts to Christianity, nothing can be more certain than at the time of his own conversion his consciousness must have been singularly receptive to truth,—pure, honest, and childlike. Poor soil will never rear a rich crop. To produce a fruitful harvest the ground must be ready for the seed; for be the latter as good as it may, unless the earth which receives it be prepared, little or naught of it will come to maturity.

As in the case of Paul, so was it with John the Revelator. When John wrote, on the isle of Patmos, "the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him," he also was on the mount of revelation, thinking from a standpoint entirely outside and clear of material sense. To the vision of the beloved disciple, matter was no longer real substance. Spirit and Spirit's perfect ideas alone were substantial. alone were real; and thus John saw "a new heaven and a new earth,"—entirely spiritual,—displacing the material concepts of heaven and earth. As Mrs. Eddy has written in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 561), "The Revelator beheld the spiritual idea from the mount of vision," adding, a little farther on, on the same page, "In divine revelation, material and corporeal selfhood disappear, and the spiritual idea is understood." All must strive to ascend "the mount of vision," for there we are above the mists of material sense, in which lie all human suffering and every belief of evil.

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