Article August 2, 1924 Issue

The Egyptians

ELIZABETH CHALLIS ADAMS

Who are the present-day Egyptians from whom we long to be freed? In Exodus is recorded the statement which came to Moses by the voice of Truth, "Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with a stretched out arm, and with great judgments." Are not our Egyptians nothing more or less than our failures to understand man's relation to God, or our false beliefs of a selfhood apart from God, which claim to bind us to the matter myth with all that this myth involves of pain and fear and selfishness? These indeed are the Egyptians we have allowed to fetter us.

As Mrs. Eddy puts it in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 223): "Sooner or later we shall learn that the fetters of man's finite capacity are forged by the illusion that he lives in body instead of in Soul, in matter instead of in Spirit." Our Leader speaks again, on page 221, of one who had recovered from indigestion only to find that he did not revel in gustatory delights "as he had imagined he would when, still the slave of matter, he thought of the fleshpots of Egypt, feeling childhood's hunger and undisciplined by self-denial and divine Science." Egypt is here linked with fleshpots, with fleshpots that we long for until true, spiritual selfhood is revealed to us and we begin to be freed from the burden of the Egyptians,—the false claims of materiality. Verily it is, as the voice said to Moses, the Lord who draws us ever toward man's unity with Him, with Mind, Spirit, Truth, Love; but we shall enter into His lasting joy and leave behind the unsatisfying, cloying, enslaving taste of Egypt's fleshpots only in so far and as fast as we are willing to be drawn toward God; in other words, only in so far as we are obedient to divine Principle.

The love of God, the life of Christ Jesus, the light thrown upon his teachings by Christian Science,—these have started us on our way out of Egypt; and if we truly wish to be free, there is no power that can again turn us back. We shall follow the example of our Leader, who said, "I saw before me the awful conflict, the Red Sea and the wilderness; but I pressed on through faith in God, trusting Truth, the strong deliverer, to guide me into the land of Christian Science, where fetters fall and the rights of man are fully known and acknowledged" (Science and Health, pp. 226, 227). The journey out of Egyptian darkness into the light of the knowledge of God may seem long, but its length will be exactly in proportion to our implicit trust in the divine Mind as the one reality, and our consequent denial of the false claims of matter. If the quality of our trust is pure,—that is, unmixed with selfish motives and desires,—the result will be loving obedience to divine Mind; and even the memory of Egyptian bondage will fade away. Then will the promises be fulfilled, "Ye shall know that I am the Lord your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians," and, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

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