EVERY Old Testament narrative has its fruitful lessons. Take that of the tower of Babel. What a height of folly this attempt to "reach unto heaven" seems to be, an extravagant conception upon a ridiculous basis, a fantastic vision quite unworthy of mankind! We read the story and wonder how these people could ever have imagined that a material structure could attain the object for which they sought. What a mortal dream it was! But are we, even in these more enlightened days, entirely exempt from mortal dreams? Are we not given to a good deal of mental building that is quite as hopeless and quite as worthless as the tower of Babel? Are not the best of us prone to build "castles in the air," where we shall find life very pleasant because we have all those material things that we imagine will conduce to our happiness and where we shall be exempt from care and anxiety? Our lives are the thermometers that indicate our spiritual temperature: when the figures are low, we shall find ourselves tempted perhaps to take less heed to the character of our mental building, and to let it be marred by material elements.
Mortal mind suggests many ways of reaching heaven, but it never tells us the right way. By its very nature it must deceive. Many human qualities that are in themselves excellent may be found useless in the great purpose of life. The people of Babel were earnest to a degree; they were no doubt perfectly sincere in the object they sought. But earnestness and sincerity are moral qualities that do not by themselves lead to that understanding of God which is the basis of all overcoming of unrighteousness. There is no middle way to heaven; we are either on the road to harmony and rest and peace, or we are not. This is clear from the fact that there can be only one foundation for our spiritual building. God is Spirit, and all that He made is spiritual. To reach to Him, to know Him, to start our thought-building so that we shall grow into the likeness of Christ, our head in all things, we must do so in the way of His appointing,—by prayer, by repentance, by humility, by seeking that anointing of spirit which reveals the spiritual temple cleansed and made a fit habitation for purity and love. What this means first of all is that we must detect the error and false belief which beset our upward path. But we are not to make the mistake of supposing, because we have heard that error has neither entity nor power, has neither intelligence nor substance, that it is to be ignored. The errors that the Babelites manifested are those that are to be fought with outright, proving their nothingness by the full and complete recognition of the allness of Truth. These people, typical of mankind in their ungodlike, unspiritual condition, and unawakened from the dream of bodily existence, placed the human before the divine, the material before the spiritual. They planned to attain the ultimate of human desire in a very human way; they ignored the only source whence their aspirations for good could possibly find fruition.
Thus Babel stands for error; "self-destroying error," Mrs. Eddy calls it in Science and Health (p. 581); "a kingdom divided against itself, which cannot stand; material knowledge." The eternal truths of righteousness are in inspiring contrast to this record of mortal blindness and conceit, and become clearer and more uplifting and regenerating to the earnest Christian as he seeks to bring his mental architecture into line with divine Principle. Here he finds his strength. Here he knows that, while he is spiritually entrenched in watchfulness and prayer, no mortal-mind sophistry can find an entrance into his mentality. It is when thought is allowed to become relaxed, when because of some failure in demonstration the tempter of despondency assails him, that there sometimes enters a feeling akin to rebellion, a desire to take the human way. The error of forgetfulness is apt to assume some sway. We are not always alert to remember that Christian Science not only reveals, but stands for, the clearest conception of spiritual law, the law of Life that makes free from the human law of sin and death. That spiritual law, pure, perfect, unchangeable, unerring, is the law of exclusion to everything unlike itself; it is eternal in its nature, and is divine Principle in operation for the government of the universe, including man. Fidelity to this law is an assured safeguard against the failure of Babeldom. But mortal sense ignores it, and finds sooner or later that it has overreached itself in its determination not to be restrained in its own freedom of action.
