Article August 5, 1922 Issue

Light Shining in Darkness

AMY C. FARISS

To the average person there is something fascinating in the thought of light, however caught or diffused. The stars embedded in their azure setting hold their unsurpassed attractiveness throughout the ages. Spread out a modern city with its artificial lights at midnight before the eyes of a savage, and there a spellbound watcher will be found. A well-told story of the flame of a dying candle, its feeble rays battling with the huge spaces in shadow, leading some lost one to a safer haven, has a touch of tenderness that rests alike on civilized and heathen.

Is it not that mortals instinctively feel hope in the idea of light? Does it not symbolize the eternal Father-Mother Love, reaching humanity in its dark hours? The psalmist says, "If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me." The same authority also says, "If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there." It is because "God is light" and knows only light, and because the Christ-idea within is ever urging us toward the light,—and not because of any power of our own,—that we eventually struggle out of the pit into which our ignorance or self-will plunges us.

When we begin to analyze light and darkness, we find how mental they are. Who has not, when alone in the twilight or looking out at an overcast sky, found his world illuminated by some secret joy? Again, if on one's heart despondency has laid its cheerless hand, has not the earth seemed dark under the blaze of the noonday sun, or at dawn when the land is fair in the soft light of a summer morning? Little by little we are learning that it is from within, and not from without that our impressions of what we see as externalized things are formed and colored. Our wise Leader, with vision clear and true, reiterates the same fact that David gave to the world centuries ago, when she writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 596): "Though the way is dark in mortal sense, divine Life and Love illumine it, destroy the unrest of mortal thought, the fear of death, and the supposed reality of error. Christian Science, contradicting sense, maketh the valley to bud and blossom as the rose."

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