"LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR DEAD."

John B. Willis

The gain attending the spiritual interpretation which Christian Science brings to the Scripture is never more apparent than when one comes to the study of the epigrammatic sayings of Christ Jesus, and a good illustrative instance is found in his seemingly severe rebuke to one who had craved the privilege of delaying his spiritual activity until he had buried his father. In the light of Christian Science it is seen that his words do not condemn any worthy human affection or impulse, but that they rebuke one of the most subtle and enslaving forms of self-mesmerism.

The number of those who are subject to periods of depression, as the result of some fruitless regret or self-condemnation, the reliving of some unhappy experience, the nursing of some sadness or sorrow, is very great, and it includes many professed Christians who apart from this mania would be cheery, wholesome, and helpful people. They are not content to abide in the living present, but are ever allying themselves with some dead issue or event over whose unburied unreality they insistently sigh.

Christian Science teaches that all life is of God, the undying, and that so-called dead things never had a real life to lose, and when this is apprehended we perceive that our persistent mental pilgrimages to a mesmeric necropolis of our own making, are not authorized by either sense or sentiment; that they are utterly foolish and worse, since they make real to mortal sense that which is not, and has no right to be—no, not even to be buried. Christian Science further teaches us to leave dead issues alone, and that emphatically and all the time, since there is no congruity between life and death and hence they should be given no companionship in our thought. All this the earnest student soon learns, or ought to, and in so far as he clings to or coddles the remembrances of materiality's defeats, the failure of its promised satisfactions, the blight of its assured joys, the unnumbered dooms and disasters with which it intensifies human fear, in so far he himself is not alive, and the call of God to him, then and there, is, "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee life." Dwell not for one moment on the discomfiting memories of material belief, but turn to Truth, to the things that live and that cannot die.

When one remembers how general is the habit of cherishing resentment, of living over past griefs, feuds, and misunderstandings, of recalling the humiliations to our pride of station and of intellect, etc., he begins to understand what it would mean for the cause of Christ, for the comfort of those with whom we have to do, and for our own peace of mind and spiritual advance, were we to obey this single injunction of the Master and zealously leave "the dead," the falsities of mortal sense, alone. It is apparent that retentive belief in the claims of materiality constitutes the substance of things not hoped for, and yet how frequently we are tempted to cling to their unseemly remains in a way which insures the indefinite continuance of their depressing influence.

We are counseled in Christian Science to look away from all this body of death "into Truth" (Science and Health, p. 261), to escape from the gruesome enslavement of the belief in death-experiencing and death-begetting things, whether they be concepts, creedal traditions, asserted laws, grievous experiences, or what not. It enables us to see that the only way to bury, to get rid of, these things is to put them out of consciousness, even as did St. Paul when he wrote the Philippians of his habit of "forgetting those things which are behind." Manifestly we cannot separate ourselves from that which we retain in consciousness, and the one way therefore to escape from every dead or dying thing, is to unknow it, leave it in the keeping of that nothingness to which it belongs. "Let the dead bury their dead."

John B. Willis.

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LETTERS TO OUR LEADER

January 15, 1910

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