TRUE manhood brightens all the world. What an effulgence announces the appearing of the right idea of man to human consciousness! What brilliancy pierces the gloom of mortal belief and dissipates the lethargy of personal sense, when the understanding of man as the son of God dawns upon the waiting thought! No wonder "the glory of the Lord shone round about" the watchful shepherds, and the wise men saw his star in the east, when Jesus came to bring this light to earth!
Christian Science is making plain to a great throng the meaning of a star as the symbol of spiritual light. All over the globe individuals and groups are reflecting the radiance which comes from a perception that the real man is neither the "miserable sinner" of the ceremonial law, nor the sick man of materia medica, nor the curiously constructed creature of physiology. Such an awakening as the world has not known since the days of primitive Christianity, is circling the globe. The "brightness of his coming" touches those who are groping in the darkness, bent and beaten by sad experiences and the oppression of uncertainty, and now they stand erect and fearless. This brightness appears at the bedside of those declared incurable, and lo, they recognize that they live and move and have their being in God, the source of all light. To the supposed victims of insatiable appetite, wandering in obscurity, desperate and resentful, there comes a beam of this light to show them the way to freedom. The searcher in the Scriptures, baffled by the prevailing literal interpretations, is about to turn away from them in disappointment, when a ray of spiritual interpretation illumines the page and he joins the multitude who subscribe to this tenet of Christian Science: "As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life" (Science and Health, p. 497).
John wrote of this light that it "shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." The destruction of error goes on without error being aware of its doom. False beliefs, mistaken theories and doctrines, attempts to materialize religion, medicine, and science,—all repeat themselves, just as though their sentence of destruction had not already been pronounced. Mankind, lured by the erroneous sense that substance is material, engages in a morbid struggle to maintain its grip on matter. Error dangles before the puzzled human thought its material concepts of men and things, and as mortal man reaches out to grasp these toys, error jerks them away and mortal man keeps on pursuing the phantoms of his own belief. But perhaps just as he reaches the brink of a precipice, a light shines on his pathway; he draws back, and follows the new light to safety and sanity in Christian Science.
