THE history of the conquest of the children of Israel by the Assyrians, as related in the Old Testament, gives to the Christian of to-day a sufficient explanation of the reason of our present bondage to the forces of evil, the possibility of our freedom through the practical activity of Christian Science, the supreme danger that confronts us. and the way of escape.
Moses, through his apprehension of God as "I am that I am," or divine Principle, that which underlies all the manifestations of being, discerned the correlated facts that there is one God whose nature is infinite good and that good is manifest in us only as we recognize and acknowledge the oneness of God and His supreme, all-embracing power. Through his clear perception of this fundamental truth, Moses freed the children of Israel from the bondage of their belief in the dominion of Egypt, and led them out in a wilderness of uninformed, uninstructed conditions of thought, where their reliance was first upon the leadership of Moses, whose spiritual power they had recognized as superior to the material domination of Pharaoh. Very soon, however, their thought was lifted to the recognition of a more impersonal guidance in their apprehension of an ever-present God, expressed in the pillar of cloud and fire.
Here in this wilderness Moses taught the Law, the difference between good and evil, the necessity of serving one God, and the certain overthrow resulting from serving evil. During the forty years of his teaching there was one thing upon which he insisted always as of supreme importance. When you enter into the land, said he, you must utterly overthrow the inhabitants, and you must not follow after any of their ways nor learn of them, but you must serve the one God and keep His laws. You must not educate your sons nor your daughters in any of their ways, even though the nations be much greater than you, but you must always teach the supremacy of Spirit. If you do this, God himself will drive out the inhabitants from before your face; but if you do it not. then you will be utterly overthrown by them. This is the oft-repeated warning of the Christ-truth voiced in the law and the statutes which Moses gave to his people.
