Editorial September 3, 1938 Issue

The Oasis

George Shaw Cook

Speaking of the redemption of Israel and their return to Zion, Jeremiah said, "Their soul shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at all." These words of the prophet are full of meaning to those who have traveled in arid districts with nothing in sight for hours at a time but sand, sagebrush, and cactus. Perhaps the traveler will have gone a whole day without seeing a stream, a lake, or any of the verdure found where water is present, and then at evening he will have come to a spot where there are green grass, trees, and flowers. Truly, the contrast with his journey through the heat of the day is a grateful one. In place of discomfort and fatigue the traveler experiences a sense of restfulness and refreshment.

Many persons in their human experience may have passed through desert wastes of material thinking, wearied by the monotony of apparently endless stretches of arid and unproductive mortal concepts—unworkable theories and unfulfilled promises. Perhaps some such may have become discouraged, faint of heart, and perplexed, but just when they have felt that they could no longer endure, they have come at last to the "watered garden" of spiritual refreshment.

Mary Baker Eddy, with appreciation of the predicament in which mortals without the sustaining influence of spiritual understanding find themselves, gives, on page 597 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," a definition of "wilderness" as follows: "Loneliness doubt; darkness. Spontaneity of thought and idea; the vestibule in which a material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence." And many readers of that book who previously seemed to be in a state of mental loneliness, doubt, and darkness have found through its teaching that "spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence." And this unfoldment has proved to them an isle of refreshment, a veritable "watered garden."

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