"Many mansions"

Annie M. Knott

It was the Master, who never disdained to appeal to the human sense by means of some familiar figure, who spoke to his disciples of the "many mansions" of the Father's house. In the thought of many Christian people the Father's house has generally been located in a realm which can only be reached after the change called death, but this does not agree with Jesus' own words in the same chapter (John xiv), where we read: "If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." This abode, however lowly, would then become one of the mansions where Love and Truth dwell with man and the divine presence constitutes heaven.

Jacob discovered this spiritual fact, when he was an exile from the home of his earthly parents, and when he lay down for the night in a dreary waste, taking a stone for his pillow. In the deep silence of the night hours a vision of angels came to him, and the infinite purpose which far transcends time and space was unfolded to him, with Love's assurance, "Behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest." Need we wonder that when morning came he exclaimed in deepest awe and reverence, "This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven"? Here, in this desert wild, he had been, as Mrs. Eddy puts it, "the guest of God," and through the long and lonely night hours had been waited upon by angels, described by her as "God's thoughts passing to man" (Science and Health, pp. 254, 581). Was not this indeed a foretaste of home and heaven as revealed in divine Science?

It is of course possible that some one may say at this point, But Jacob had to die in order to reach the reality foreshadowed in this experience. This would, however, be quite contrary to the teaching of Christ Jesus, who insisted that the one who keeps his saying shall never see death, and who furthermore quoted that splendid passage from the Old Testament, "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," the Master's comment being, "He is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him," which surely means that to God no one was ever dead, for God is Life. We read that the patriarchs dwelt in tents, but in so far as they there remembered and loved the divine ever-presence, they were each in one of the many mansions as truly as if they had been in Solomon's stately palace or even in the temple at Jerusalem called by his name. In his "Sesame and Lilies," Ruskin says of the true woman, that wherever she may be, even if without shelter, the glowworm her only lamp, yet there is home and peace.

Christian Science has come to emphasize and make practical the great truth that Mind is the builder of all which may worthily be called home or city, and of whatever does not represent divine Mind, Christ Jesus said that there should not be left of it "one stone upon another." The mansion where God's child dwells should be fair, pure, and beautiful, though to mortal sense it may seem to be compassed by the walls of one simple room. But Mind's idea is never confined within material walls, and the Christian Scientist knows that the reflected light of Spirit radiates out into the world's deepest darkness, telling of life, health, happiness; in a word, "the home of the Soul"!

Of the blessed Master who tells us of the many mansions, Mrs. Eddy says that, when he was with his students, "a fishing-boat became a sanctuary, and the solitude was peopled with holy messages from the All-Father. The grove became his class-room, and nature's haunts were the Messiah's university" (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 91). He said, "I go to prepare a place for you." The homes thus prepared are for those who are seeking and finding man's spiritual heritage, complete before the foundation of the world. What matters it, then, that some have, to mortal sense, passed within the shadow! All live unto God, and find home "there," as we should "here," for these are but human distinctions, while the eternal fact is the Father's house.

Annie M. Knott.

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