Article November 12, 1927 Issue

Spiritual Birth

VINCENT H. P. MOLTENO

Foretelling the fall of materialism and the tribulation that would attend it, Jesus warned his disciples to beware of false prophecy. This warning was directed not only against falsity which would claim to dethrone the Christ as God's means of salvation, but also against ignorant or malicious attempts to misinterpret current human experience, and thus give a perverted view of the work of Truth in the destruction of error.

The Master's warning was timely then; and it is no less imperative in our day. The coming of spiritual understanding to human consciousness, through the activity of divine Principle, may seem to the unillumined human mind to be a destructive process, but by the spiritually illumined human thought this purification is understood and joyfully accepted. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science and the author of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," calls attention to this on page 96 of this textbook, when she says, "The breaking up of material beliefs may seem to be famine and pestilence, want and woe, sin, sickness, and death, which assume new phases until their nothingness appears."

Had this process been more clearly understood, individuals would often have been spared much unkind and harmful criticism, and nations would have been protected from the injustice inflicted upon them by immature judgment, which, from a merely material standpoint, and with no other evidence than the seeming "famine and pestilence, want and woe," has falsely prophesied degeneration and destruction. Those, however, who have ears to hear and eyes to see, and who judge events from a moral and spiritual basis, which basis alone provides an infallible guide, are greatly encouraged by our Leader's explanation of the disturbance which is apt to follow the appearance of spiritual truth in human consciousness. On page 540 of Science and Health, under the marginal heading "Cleansing upheaval," a statement is presented which throws new light on this seemingly bitter experience, reversing the human misconception of it and making of it a stepping-stone to a fuller life.

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November 12, 1927
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