Article August 20, 1955 Issue

"THE SNARE IS BROKEN"

ALFRED HULL STEVENS, JR.

"Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped." This seventh verse of Psalm 124 points out a valuable truth about spiritual healing. It is not a process of going back the way we have come in order to escape the situation that appears to have gripped us. Instead, the evil or snare itself breaks right at the point where we are.

What is the soul that needs an escape? This is made clear in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where Mary Baker Eddy writes on page 482: "The proper use of the word soul can always be gained by substituting the word God, where the deific meaning is required. In other cases, use the word sense, and you will have the scientific signification." God, being infinite and omnipotent, cannot possibly be imprisoned or contained, or indeed limited in any conceivable manner. Neither can His perfect image and likeness, spiritual man, the real identity of each one of us.

Only soul as sense—false, dreaming, materialistic sense—imagines itself to be caught or threatened. This imagination is so habitual, so convincing, so mesmeric, that its victims dream it to be reality. Within this dream state is a great deal of suffering which seems to the dreamers to be terribly real. In Christian Science we learn that it is not real, and we follow Christ Jesus in laboring compassionately and patiently to waken from the dream every individual who is willing to be so helped.

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