To the student of Christian Science the incidents related in the Bible are not regarded merely as records of past and gone human personalities, but serve rather to typify various states and stages of mortal thought in process of correction. Some very good persons, such as Jacob, David, and Elijah, are known to have made grave mistakes; but these mistakes, when seen and corrected, served only to advance these spiritual seers into yet higher realms of vision, even as men today "may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things."
No one need bewail an honest mistake. The thing to bewail is the making of the same mistake twice. No one ever seemed to make more mistakes than Peter, but he afterward raised the dead. With one notable exception, that of our great Master and Teacher, Jesus the Christ, the man who never makes a mistake is usually the man who never does anything else either. It is with an experience of Moses, that faithful and consecrated leader of the Hebrew people, that this article has to deal. It occurred at the time when, upon returning from his forty days with God upon mount Sinai, he found the children of Israel engaged in worshiping the golden calf which they themselves had set up. Filled with sudden anger, he broke the tables of stone whereon were written the ten commandments, and followed that up by melting the golden image, grinding it into powder, and compelling the unhappy idolaters to drink the bitter dose of their own error.
Then the mental pendulum swung to other extreme, as unbalanced pendulums are prone to do, and an emotion equally intense took possession of Moses. In place of vehement human anger he is swayed by unreasoning human sympathy, and is next found pleading with God to be allowed to suffer for the sins of his brethren. "This people have sinned a great sin," he cries. "Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written."
