Article May 12, 1923 Issue

"Mansions"

FLORENCE C. PENZOTTI

The writer has been helped many times by our Leader's beautiful interpretation of the last line of the twenty-third psalm, as given in our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 578), "I will dwell in the house [the consciousness] of [love] for ever." While dwelling in that house, fears are stilled, and God is recognized as close at hand. But it sometimes seems as though error, through the false beliefs of the yesterdays, endeavors to pull one back into these yesterdays' mistaken beliefs of limitation and pain.

One day the writer's attention was attracted to the beautiful poem, "The Chambered Nautilus," by Oliver Wendell Holmes. This poem is based on the construction of the peculiar shell fish, the nautilus, which grows by building one chamber of its shell after another, each a little larger than the last. When the nautilus has moved into its newest chamber, it builds a wall across the opening leading into the smaller chamber, thereby sealing it. The writer saw in this a lesson. After having gained a truer state of consciousness, she had failed to seal the wall between it and the smaller chamber of the past; and in this subtle way error had always seemed to rob her of her new-found freedom and joy. She was then and there healed of that old torment. Now each demonstration made, each true position gained, serves her as an aid to another of the "mansions." Who would go back to a hovel after dwelling in a mansion? In the Bible we read, "In my Father's house are many mansions." We know that these "mansions" are exalted states of consciousness, which are for us all to inhabit as fast as we grow to that understanding.

In the last verse of the poem referred to above we read:—

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