Article January 31, 1942 Issue

Sermon of the Lilies

[Written Especially for Young People]

TILLIE C. VAN DER VOORT

ONE forenoon in early spring, a student of Christian Science was rambling through some woods, where he was spending a brief holiday. Coming to a little clearing, he sat down on a mossy bank, and rested against a sun-warmed rock. The stillness seemed only to be accentuated by an occasional faint breeze sighing through the pine trees, distant, sweet bird calls, and the slow, scraping progress of a porcupine, as he clambered up the trunk of a near-by giant cedar.

With the exception of the evergreens, the trees were as yet almost bare, and all around him, as far as he could see, were countless thousands of white trilliums. They reminded him of Jesus' message in the Sermon on the Mount, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow." He did consider them with delighted and rapt attention. He soon noticed that they were all facing the same way, towards the sun each slender stem bent gracefully at the same angle. Every lovely lily in this widespread floral carpet seemed to be paying tribute to the sun, completely receptive to the light directing it, and concerned with nothing else.

This quiet woodland scene recalled a favorite passage in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 209), "Mind, supreme over all its formations and governing them all, is the central sun of its own systems of ideas, the life and light of all its own vast creation; and man is tributary to divine Mind." The student was again awakened to the necessity of keeping thought turned constantly toward the light of Truth, Life, and Love, and ever receptive to the government of divine Mind. As one looks steadfastly to Spirit, the only source of man's intelligence, happiness, health, and prosperity, there can be no cessation of these blessings, no cognizance of discord, disease, or failure. These seeming troubles result from turning away from Mind's perfect government in the mistaken belief that the human self has the power and ability to create all the conditions necessary to man's well-being. The false, mortal sense of self claims often to exalt itself in human thinking, and to say, "I can do this," or, "I must do that;" but the Master declared, "I can of mine own self do nothing." He claimed no personal ability; he gave God all the glory for his accomplishments, and assured his followers that they, too, could do the works that he did, for the Mind he manifested is equally ever present and available to all. Paul said, "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."

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