Article December 25, 1937 Issue

"In time of harvest"

NELLIE B. MACE

When a good work has been done, men are sometimes inclined to relax their watchfulness. If disturbing conditions appear, they may learn that these are the outcome of evil's sowing which they, perhaps, had not noticed. Then they sometimes wish to be precipitate and uproot the discords, even though misdirected zeal might also destroy the effects of the good work done.

Jesus touched upon the errors of apathy and of impatience in his parable of the tares and the wheat, and pointed the lesson that it is only through the activity of pure thoughts—"the reapers are the angels," he said—that the error can be destroyed and the good safely garnered. The parable refers to the common knowledge that both good and bad influences appear in individual and general experience. Observation of such experience would lend little hope for achievement of permanent harmony, did not reason show, as in Jesus' parable, that good and evil are not equal.

In explaining the parable to his disciples, Jesus said that the field in which the tares were sown while men slept is the world, and that both the wheat and the tares grow together until the inevitable distinguishing, in the harvest. On another occasion, however, he rebuked the thought which would regard the harvest as yet to come, saying, "Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest." Continuous, then, is the mental harvest, which requires the work of recognizing the wheat of Truth and rejecting the tares of error, garnering the spiritual understanding and destroying the material beliefs. Christian Science strikes at the root of the trouble. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy says (p. 269): "From first to last the supposed coexistence of Mind and matter and the mingling of good and evil have resulted from the philosophy of the serpent. Jesus' demonstrations sift the chaff from the wheat, and unfold the unity and the reality of good, the unreality, the nothingness, of evil."

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