Editorial November 14, 1942 Issue

Memory

Evelyn F. Heywood

On page 407 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy has written: "In Science, all being is eternal, spiritual, perfect, harmonious in every action. Let the perfect model be present in your thoughts instead of its demoralized opposite." The purpose of memory, therefore, is to retain only that which is good.

It is inconceivable to suppose that Jesus preserved in memory the privations of the wilderness, the persecution of his own people, the infidelity of his followers, or after his resurrection the brutality of the soldiers in the judgment seat and the agony of those hours upon the cross. Mortal mind would use memory in ways gay and sad, to draw men into the past and deflect them from the present; to build up personal sense, to evoke admiration, horror, or pity. It is certain that the only memory exercised by Jesus was that which reminded him of his spiritual being, his relationship with God. "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world," he told his disciples. And again he spoke of "the glory which I had with thee before the world was." To awaken men out of sleep, not to remind them of phases in the dream, was his sole purpose.

When the gigantic cataclysmic happenings which are convulsing the world today have been brought under control, will men continue to draw and encourage others to draw upon the warehouse of mortal memory, that they may restage and revitalize the tragedies and horrors that are past? Or will they rather, as Jesus must have done after his resurrection, dwell not in thought or word upon the evils devised and incited by the worst passions of men, but upon redemption and deliverance? Will they exercise immortal memory in the knowledge of their divine origin, in the acceptance of their own resurrection, and see that the shadows of the past fall not even temporarily aslant the forward, upward way? Upon this decision must depend their strength, their usefulness, their own continuous ascension out of mortality into immortality, out of personal selfhood into conscious spiritual being.

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