Article May 27, 1944 Issue

While Yet in Prison

DOROTHY H. STEPHENS

In Jeremiah we read, "The word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah the second time, while he was yet shut up in the court of the prison." Do not many of us seem to be shut up in prison, some of us, quite literally, as prisoners of war, others in prisons of sickness, of fear, of sin, of lack of opportunity, deprived of friends and education? Yet into every one of these prisons the word of the Lord can penetrate, bringing liberty to the captive, for "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

How is it that we should seem to be thus imprisoned, and how can we gain release? Surely it is not the will of our loving Father that His children should be crippled with disease, hampered by lack of any good thing, friendless, or depressed! No! It is His will that we shall rejoice in the possession, by reflection, of all that He has made—radiant health, unerring wisdom, unfailing joy. "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." But we read, "There went up a mist from the earth," and immediately we get a distorted view of man. The only effect of mist is to obscure from our vision that which, nevertheless, it cannot efface or even affect. The five physical senses are the mist through which we see this distortion of God's man; they would condemn mankind to be shackled with its own cruel ties of limitation and want. The only way we can become conscious of any ill is through these physical senses. They distort our view of creation, but can never alter creation itself; they obscure, but cannot destroy, our freedom; they claim to imprison that which can never be imprisoned—the wholly spiritual creation of Spirit.

How can we gain our ascendancy over the material senses? "To strike out right and left against the mist, never clears the vision; but to lift your head above it, is a sovereign panacea," is Mary Baker Eddy's recipe as given on page 355 of "Miscellaneous Writings."

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