Article May 31, 1941 Issue

Rending the Veil

HERBERT W. COCHRAN

The thirty-fourth chapter of Exodus tells how Moses, after he had written the Ten Commandments, "put a vail on his face" when speaking to the children of Israel, but when he "went in before the Lord ... he took the vail off." In the New Testament, the writer of Hebrews speaks of "a new and living way, which he [Jesus] hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh." So, while man appears fleshly, material, and finite to human sense, from the standpoint of Principle he is the infinite expression of divine Life, spiritual and perfect. It is the specific purpose of Christian Science, as discovered and founded by Mary Baker Eddy, to rend the fictitious concept of material conjecture and to throw the light of spiritual understanding, the Christ-light, upon creation, and thus dispel the gloom of sense.

As human beings, we are wearing a veil, which is the insidious belief in the flesh and mortality. We put off this veil in the proportion that we open our thought to the Christ, the true idea of God. On pages 325 and 326 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy says, "A false sense of life, substance, and mind hides the divine possibilities, and conceals scientific demonstration." A mortal and material sense of man and creation is certainly false having no life, substance, or intelligence abiding in it. Therefore immortality, eternal harmony, and perpetuity, concomitants of spirituality, are not to be found in a material sense of being. Our Leader says (ibid., p. 259), "The Christlike understanding of Scientific being and divine healing includes a perfect Principle and idea,—perfect God and perfect man,—as the basis of thought and demonstration." The evidence that creation is divine and faultless becomes palpable to us only as we rid ourselves of the illusion that matter is sentient and substantial.

Christian Science shows that everything real is spiritual, immortal, and perfect. That the five physical senses dispute this fact is of no consequence when we consider that the testimony of these senses is deceptive and finite. Christ Jesus consistently overruled sense testimony, and established the better evidence of immortal harmony. In other words, he proved that harmony is not destructible and mutable, but is hidden, to human sense, beneath the false beliefs of sin, disease, disaster, and discord. The misapprehension of being as inharmonious and subject to error brings the very things from which humanity would like to escape. Consequently, the veil which must be rent from top to bottom is the false testimony of the material senses. Since this testimony is the product of mortal mind—the externalization of erroneous material thought—we find our freedom only as we exchange this testimony for the evidence gained from spiritual fact-gathering and scientific reasoning.

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