Editorial July 6, 1929 Issue

Balaam or Balak

Violet Ker Seymer

It is stated in the book of Numbers that the children of israel had come up out of the land of Egypt and were pressing toward the land of promise. Their advance struck terror into the heart of Balak, King of Moab, and he accordingly gave to Balaam, his diviner, the command, "Come, curse me Jacob, and come, defy Israel." Balaam, however, had gone to "an high place" and returned from his communion with God, good, with such fresh illumination that he referred to himself as "the man whose eyes are open." Disregarding both the king's promises and his threats, Balaam then replied persistently, "Behold, I have received commandment to bless: and he hath blessed; and I cannot reverse it."

The demonstrations of healing in Christian Science are invading the hitherto almost unchallenged territory of materiality, and in the futile attempt to delay the victorious advance of pure Christianity, it would sometimes seem as though there were great resistance to the healing power of Truth and Love. Hence everyone who turns to Christian Science for healing and redemption needs to keep clearly before him, as did Balaam, that God bestows perpetual, unalterable blessings on all His creation; and that not one of these has ever been withdrawn, or reversed.

If the would-be curse and defiance of corporeal sense, in short, the Balak arguments, seem to be unyielding in their insistence upon material opposition and prolonged suffering, the Christian Scientist is untiring and firmer still in his insistence upon the irreversible divine blessings of health, holiness, and immortality. Accordingly, he sets himself to maintain man's God-given dominion over all discord and remembers Mrs. Eddy's words in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 149), "The richest blessings are obtained by labor."

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