WITHOUT AND WITHIN

John B. Willis

It is characteristic of the immature that they live without rather than within; they are absorbed in and dependent upon the objective and phenomenal. Thus the kindergartner begins to teach numbers with grains of corn; she enters the domain of thought through the open eye. Thus, too, Christ Jesus taught the multitude in parables, little word-pictures of outer life which served as scaffolding for the creation of a temple of right thought. Indeed the many, Thomaslike, insist that they must be permitted to lay their hands upon every fact they are asked to accept; and this demand is satisfied today in the healing of the sick through Christian Science, even as it was satisfied by the Master when he permitted the doubting disciple to place his hand upon his pierced side.

Though thus recognized and conceded to by divine grace, this habit of living in the material rather than the mental is rebuked by St. Paul when he reminds the Ephesians that life's real struggle is not a wrestling "against flesh and blood," but against that evil mentality which rules in "the darkness of this world." This is one of the hardest lessons for us all to learn, that evil is not really objective but subjective, and that it is not to be resisted with material means, but with the word of Truth.

The career of the crusader has always appealed to human sense, and the favor with which even Christian men and nations regard this militant attitude is still manifest in their devotion to national armaments. All this gives peculiar pertinence to the teaching of Christian Science that only the inner struggles can be effectual, that every genuine victory is to be won in the mental arena, and this teaching must be understood by those who would arrive at that true and spiritually helpful interpretation of history and prophecy which always saves us from absorption in material phenomena, and enables us to relate the symbol or the historic event to our inner experience.

Emerson did much to awaken thought to the fact that every struggle is but a battle between right and wrong concepts, but it remained for Mrs. Eddy to make clear that in its totality "the suppositional warfare between truth and error is only the mental conflict between the evidence of the spiritual senses and the testimony of the material senses" (Science and Health, p. 288). When the individual has reduced things, all historic facts and phenomena, to thoughts, then he is able not only to interpret them in terms of mental experience, but to "cast down" the evil, by his realization of good; error has in his instance become amenable to Truth.

In this way the story of Joseph or of Daniel comes to have an entirely new significance. We are working out our own problems by understanding and entering into theirs. Thus too the prophecy of the Apocalypse is to be interpreted, not in the characters and events which pertained to the struggle between the early church and the power of Rome, nor yet in the political and ecclesiastical misgovernments and turmoil of later times, but as Science and Health has shown us, in the strife between false beliefs and awakening spiritual perception. St. John's beasts may be seen to represent various embodiments of error, and that fittingly, before we reach through Christian Science their true identification with that materiality and fear from which none of us are yet wholly free.

To live without is to become a prey to the seemings of sense, and though one may be honestly trying to find God, he is sure to be swamped in the contradictions of world experience. To live within is to know no reality save Spirit and its manifestation, perfect God and man in His image; it is to acquire that spiritual insight and point of view which compasses and commands all prophecy and human experience, as the mathematician commands the symbols for number. Then spiritual verities alone are consented to, we have found the kingdom of heaven "within."

John B. Willis.

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