“The secret place of the most high”

Christian Science is to-day showing humanity, tired and heartsick with half truths, false trusts, and deferred hopes, both what is the secret place of the Most High and the way there. For thousands of years the world has been taught to think of a heaven beyond the grave; taught that the utmost it could hope for was salvation hereafter; taught that, in this world, God's guerdon was “many a labor, many a sorrow, many a tear;” taught that this God, in His inscrutable wisdom, sent sickness and sorrow, sin and death, among men “for a good purpose,” and that, if these miseries were endured with suitable resignation, “the last enemy” would one day usher man into heaven, would usher him into the presence of the God who had afflicted him with suffering, the idea of inflicting the smallest particle of which on his fellow man would have filled him with horror. To all this mortal man has been trained from his earliest childhood to say, “Amen.”

Through all the ages, it is true, there have been those who revolted against such teaching; men whose passionate love for humanity overbore all else, and who in their love for God and man, were able to bridge all doubts in their theology. They have so inspired many with their own hope and faith. They have found what they felt sure was the secret place of the Most High, but how they had found it, they could not say. To paraphrase Southey's words—

Now, in times of ease and comparative peace, such teaching has passed muster. There seemed to be nothing better to offer, and men were willing to subscribe to something which, however little it might enter into their lives, could not do them any harm, and might ultimately be of some service to them. They said, “Amen,” dutifully, with all the others, and went to the doctor for healing in their sickness, sought by a thousand material safeguards to secure their food and raiment, and sought surcease from worry and care in a thousand material joys.

It is different, however, when all material aid has proved unavailing; when the doctor has decided that there is no hope; when all the safeguards have failed to avert poverty, loss, and sorrow, and when not one of the thousand material joys can bring to mortal man one ray of cheer. When a man is thus alone, with his back to the wall, whether it is in the silence of his own room, with despair his only companion, or facing what seems to be certain death on the field of battle, stereotyped religion is likely to meet and is meeting with short shrift at his hands. “Tell me of a God that will help me now; tell me of a God that will heal me and save me now; tell me of a God who is a very present help in time of trouble, and does not only promise to be; tell me of the God that Jesus knew, however he may have known Him, the God that enabled him to still the tempest and raise the dead; tell me of such a secret place, such a fortress, and such a refuge, and tell me the way there, and I will listen.”

And Christian Science comes to such a one and tells him. Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, was one day in just such a pass as this. Stricken down as the result of an accident, given over by her friends to die, she asked for a Bible, and she opened it at the story of the healing of the man sick of the palsy—Matthew ix, 2 . “As I read,” she writes in her book, “Miscellaneous Writings” (p. 24 ), “the healing Truth dawned upon my sense; and the result was that I rose, dressed myself, and ever after was in better health than I had before enjoyed. That short experience included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit; this Life being the sole reality of existence.” And again, farther down on the same page, she writes: “A knowledge of both good and evil (when good is God, and God is All) is impossible. Speaking of the origin of evil, the Master said: ‘When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.’”

To-day then the secret place is at hand. And if there are those who see only doubt and disappointment, let them have patience. Mrs. Eddy writes on page 558 of Science and Health, the textbook of Christian Science, “To mortal sense Science seems at first obscure, abstract, and dark; but a bright promise crowns its brow.” And what is the promise of Christian Science? No less than complete salvation, here and now, from everything that is unlike good. We cannot make our claim too big. “Right in the midst of triumphant slavery,” one has written of William Lloyd Garrison, “he used to say, ‘I am in earnest, and I will be heard.’” So Christian Science gives to every one the power to declare himself to be the son of God, right in the midst of aggressive materialism, even as it vaunts itself in the air above in all the horrors of shot and shell, or threat and fear, to be able to say, “I am safe.” “Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual” (Science and Health, p. 468 ).

What, then, it is asked, becomes of matter and all that goes with matter—its dangers and disasters, its sickness and death? Christian Science answers that it is not real; holds that Jesus meant what he said when he declared, “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing,” and insists that an understanding of this fact brings the proof of its own truth. Could anything have been more real to the human senses than the storm on the lake when the little ship labored in the sea against contrary winds, when the waves broke over the gunwales and the disciples, who knew every tide and wind of the sea, called out in despair, “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” Could anything have been more unreal and unpresent, more of “a dream when one awaketh” than the storm when the Master, knowing its unreality and powerlessness, had said, “Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm”?

Is not this then the secret place of the Most High, and is not Jesus, as he said he was, the Way? If we dwell in this secret place, in this consciousness that only the good is real and has power; and if the abiding in this consciousness, even falteringly and imperfectly, is able to heal sickness, turn aside danger, open a way, at once, out of the most desperate positions, is not this then to “abide under the shadow of the Almighty”? And will not this enable us to add, as does the psalmist, “I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust”?