Article September 1, 2013

Day

Originally published in October 28, 1916 issue of The Christian Science Monitor

It was a true instinct which animated the ancient peoples when they turned from worship of the moon to the worship of the sun, from the queen of the night to the lord of the day. This change indicated true progress, albeit, on the lines of idol worship. Almost for the first time men were casting behind them the shadow of their fears, and beginning to recognize the power of light and Truth. The sun myth, as typified in the worship in turn of Merodach, of Apollo, or of Bel, and ultimately in the kingship of Arthur Pendragon, was, at any rate, more elevating and less mischievous than the moon myth woven round the zigurat, round the dragon, round Tiarmat, or portrayed in the ruin of the Round Table in "that great battle in the west.” It would, in short, be curious, if it were not inevitable, to look back and see how, persistently, if slowly, through the centuries, the ever improving human thought has strode from out of darkness toward the light. The secret of this is hidden from the unredeemed human consciousness, but it is to be read, in a measure, by every man who has ever seen; in any degree, the vision of the Christ.

In the old folk tales, or rather in one of the innumerable old folk tales, of the struggle between light and darkness, the battle continued long and furiously, until, at last, light thrust a mass of tow into the mouth of darkness. This tow gradually swelled and swelled, until finally the body of darkness or evil was shattered into fragments by the increasing pressure, and the victory of light was assured. This surely is just what Mrs. Eddy implies, on page 476 of Science and Health, when she writes, "Error, urged to its final limits, is self-destroyed." What Mrs. Eddy was showing, in that passage, was that as the vision of the Christ grows clearer and clearer to human eyes, the lie about God and man must cease to deceive. In other words, as the quotation continues, "Error will cease to claim that soul is in body, that life and intelligence are in matter, and that this matter is man." This unfoldment is what, on page 584 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy calls "God's day," or, to quote the entire passage, "The objects of time and sense disappear in the illumination of spiritual understanding, and Mind measures time according to the good that is unfolded. This unfolding is God's day, and 'there shall be no night there.'"

Day, then, is the light of spiritual understanding, night the ignorance of human-belief. And this ignorance finds its natural expression in the surrender of all material consciousness to sleep. With the dawn, however, comes the severing of this mesmerism. The recognition of this came even to the primitive man, as he watched the red circle of the sun, flashing into gold, as it rose out of the black abyss of water which his fears pictured as well nigh omnipotent evil:

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