THE night breeze has gathered in its cool embrace the many fragrances of the warm summer day, and wafting them across the meadows, gently filters through the thick foliage of the trees and sinks away toward a sky banked with varied grays. The trees whisper to the wind as they sway in their sleep, and the river underneath the boughs cradles and rocks their sombre reflections slowly to stillness. Far away over the fields and trees, beyond where the train is painting billowy clouds of steam ruddy with flames, is the arc of light that shows where the town lies in restless unconsciousness; its tall chimneys stand out sharply, — repelling sentinels watching o'er the tawdry tinsel of material riches. Here on the countryside there is less of the work of mortal man, and the land lies in quiet and peace.
Come, brother man! stranger to Christian Science, rest here awhile and let us meditate on these things. Is this strange and unthinkable to you, that the author of Science and Health says, "Mortal existence is a dream, it has no real entity" (Science and Health, p. 250)? Look at yonder city. A few hours ago its streets were teeming with people, men hurrying along with a world of worry on their faces. What occupied their thoughts, that they were all so busy? Was it because they gained so much pleasure from their work, that they rushed with feverish haste and jostled each other? No! Analyze their thought carefully, and you will reduce it to its impelling elements of fear and selfishness. If it were possible to enter into their consciousness now at night, you would see the same thing going on. Business men are still putting in "tenders" for huge contracts in keeping with their ambition; architects are conceiving edifices imposing and grand, but, alas! as illusive as the consciousness limning them. Politicians are rising to a state of eloquence before a parliamentary crowd as unreal as the eloquence; and the fading society lady dreams of resuscitated beauty and larger social triumphs. Think, are not all these dream creations as real to the dreamer as any experience in the so-called waking state of the dreamers? If it were possible to tell the dreamer without awakening him that he was self-deceived, would he believe it? Would any one in the same state of consciousness be able to awaken the dreamer from his false concepts; would it not be rightly termed a revelation if some one in that dream state gained an apprehension of the ordinary waking state and conveyed it to those still dreaming?
All this dream chaos is the state which the human mind terms "repose." It is to this that it consigns the body for "rest," it is this muddle that stands as a symbol at once of peace and of death. Here and there the deep thinkers like Shakespeare have followed out the so-called parallelism farther, as he does when he makes his Hamlet soliloquize: —
