Article February 15, 1941 Issue

The Threshing Time

MILDRED PHILLIPS KINDY

THE threshing of grain is a process as old as the history of agriculture. The threshing instrument has varied with the period. In Bible times it was the threshing sledge or tribulum, crudely made of wood and studded underneath with sharp stones or knives to strip the husks from the kernels as the sledge passed over the grain on the threshing floor. From this tribulum arose the word "tribulation." How far from its original sense of "threshing instrument" is its later significance of "distress" and "affliction"! From the standpoint of its earlier meaning there are helpful lessons to be learned.

Threshing time is harvest time. Christian Science teaches that spiritual harvests must be garnered. Human thinking must be threshed in order to separate the valuable from the worthless, the true from the false, the real from the unreal. Christian Science also teaches that only the good is true, for God, infinite good, is All-in-all. Only true ideas should remain in consciousness. False suggestions of sin, disease, death, lack, war, are merely presentments of a supposititious mortal mind. They are evil's attempts to manifest itself, and should be cast out of consciousness. Threshing, or separation of error from truth, leaves a pure and holy state of thought which, as the reflection of divine Mind, is man's only real consciousness.

Spiritual harvesting is spiritual achievement. On page 428 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy writes, "To divest thought of false trusts and material evidences in order that the spiritual facts of being may appear, — this is the great attainment by means of which we shall sweep away the false and give place to the true." This spiritual process of divesting or stripping the chaff of materiality from the grain of spirituality by means of spiritual discernment, is the enlightened sense of tribulation as a divinely mental threshing experience.

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