Editorial June 5, 1943 Issue

Wheat and Chaff

Paul Stark Seeley

For a long time men have been separating wheat from chaff as a necessary process in securing food. But Isaiah saw that there is important mental threshing work for each individual to do in order for him to be supplied with spiritual food, the bread of Life. He must separate what is evil and false from what is good and true, conserving the latter and destroying the former. The separation necessarily precedes the destruction. Both take place in the arena of individual consciousness. The "threshing instrument" is provided for us by God. Isaiah describes it thus: "Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth." The teeth crack and break down the resistance of chaff to separation from the wheat. So the Word of God, understandingly declared, breaks down in our thinking error's resistance to separation from truth.

The threshing instrument is man's God-given ability to think spiritually, to discern and to express spiritual reality, and to repudiate and nullify material unreality. God gives to each the true idea of cause and effect, of Mind and its idea, which, when seen and clung to, separates in our consciousness the real from the unreal. Our part in this is through study, prayer, and application of the Christ, Truth, in daily experience, more fully to understand God and His idea. This spiritual-mindedness separates from our thinking the chaff of material falsity, patent or latent, abstract or concrete.

Our threshing instrument has great possibilities. With it Isaiah says, "Thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff." The problems, large and small, of human experience, every one of them, shall be beaten small and fully solved, through spiritual understanding.

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