EVEN in these days of vivid happenings, the story of the little party of marooned antarctic explorers is one that brings a thrill to the heart and tears to the eyes, while the account of their rescue outfictions the most imaginative tales of modern writers. For months these men were to mortal sense existing on a narrow ledge of ice, scarcely able to move, and with hardly enough food to sustain life; but one man among them, the second in command, never gave up hope. With unfaltering trust in his superior officer, his courage higher than the heavy seas that lashed their rock, and his endurance firmer than the wrecked ship which bore that name, he encouraged and cheered his comrades through the long weeks of unimaginable suffering and privation, until the one day, when their provisions were spent, when the fog was thickest and the cold keenest, suddenly through the driving mist appeared the hull of the rescue ship! Within one hour every man of them was on board and homeward bound!
This story of human fortitude and its glorious reward is not without a parallel in the realm of metaphysics. When Christian Science is first presented to people sometimes they are so chained by physical disability, so weighted with cares and anxieties, so frozen by mortal cruelty, so starving for lack of love, that their state is like to that of imprisonment on a narrow ledge of ice in a polar sea. Sometimes when these conditions are not at once broken but continue for weary months, they are tempted to feel that Christian Science is failing them, that it will never heal them, and that the day of deliverance will never dawn. If in the long hours of trial these sufferers will but have faith, courage, hope, and endurance, assuredly one day, when perhaps error seems blackest, the rescue will come; Truth will break through the clouds of sense, and literally literally in one hour the diseases of years and the problems of a lifetime will fall away from them into the oblivious past, and they will stand upright and free, homeward bound for the heaven which exists for us here and now.
If any one could have told the antarctic hero, during the time he was unable to stretch his cramped limbs a matter of inches, that in February, 1917, he would find himself standing in Buckingham Palace, it would have seemed a fairy tale beyond all dreams of realization. In the same way there are hundreds of people whose lives have been transfigured and redeemed, in a manner proportionably as a great, by the action of Truth, of scientific Christianity.
