Article September 17, 1932 Issue

"No more sea"

CHARLOTTE RUTH DECKER

AS a part of St. John's vision recorded in the book of Revelation, we read that when the material sense of heaven and earth had disappeared and the true concept was realized, "there was no more sea." The meaning of this simple statement is worth our careful study. Mrs. Eddy writes of it in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 536), "In St. John's vision, heaven and earth stand for spiritual ideas, and the sea, as a symbol of tempest-tossed human concepts advancing and receding, is represented as having passed away."

The man-made theories as to what constitutes harmonious existence, and how to bring it into experience, are certainly like the ebbing and flowing tides of the sea. The cures advanced for the fears and ills of one generation recede and are forgotten by their children, and then another wave of human concepts sweeps in. All through the ages we see humanity searching for some stable anchorage which will assure them of peace and safety. The remedy is in God's Word, the inspired teachings of the Bible, but as long as the enigma of the Adam-dream, described in the second chapter of Genesis, is accepted as the explanation of man's origin, the remedy meets with indifferent success. Small wonder that many have turned from the contradictory theory of an omnipotent, omniscient God creating man in His own image and likeness, yet subject to sin, disease. and death.

In the thirty-third chapter of Job we read, "If there be an interpreter, one among a thousand, to shew unto man his uprightness : then he is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit: I have found a ransom." Such "an interpreter" was Christ Jesus, who came teaching and proving by his works that man is the son of God, and as the son of God is not subject to the materiality presented by the five material senses. Jesus had, indeed, "found a ransom"; but his interpretation was accepted by only a comparatively small number at the time, and very soon it became adulterated by materiality. And so the vision was temporarily obscured to mankind, and the search continued.

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