As mentioned in Scripture the threshing floor is typical of the point where the accumulated result of patience and industry is gathered, and where the good and useful is separated from the bad and useless. It is a metaphor freely used in the Bible and is synonymous with purification, as every Bible student is aware. Among the many literal incidents connected with threshing floors there are four which seem to hold special interest and metaphysical significance, and in which there is a beautiful lesson for the Christian Science student who is just beginning to gain the spiritual understanding of the Scriptures.
The first is that of Joseph and his brethren leaving Egypt on their way to bury their father Jacob. We read that, arriving at the threshing floor of Atad, "they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation." Again, we read that Gideon "threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the Midianites," when he received his unquestionable commission to deliver his people. We are also told how David came to "the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite," where he caught the vision of "the house of the Lord God," and where subsequently his son Solomon erected the temple. Then we read of Ruth with Naomi returning out of the country of Moab, and on arriving at Bethlehem they are told that Boaz "winnoweth barley tonight in the threshing floor."
Perhaps there is no happier period in the experience of the Christian Science student, and one that memory recalls with more gladness, than the time when he first entered into the study of this wonderful and beautiful teaching. Like children going to school and learning the rule of addition as their first lesson in the science of numbers, so the beginner in the Science of being increases his happiness and aids his progress by the same rule, in daily and continuously adding together his little demonstrations and simple proofs of the allness of God, good. But although the first experience brings such a great sense of peace and happiness, freedom and fearlessness, yet in the natural order of progress and scientific development there has to come the time, as in mathematics, when it is essential that the rule be reversed and the rule of subtraction be substituted, and subtraction is but addition reversed.
