Religious people in general are acquainted with the phrase "the promised land," and are accustomed to think of it in the first place as Canaan in the days when the children of Israel under the leadership of Moses and of Joshua were seeking to take possession of it. In the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy we find wonderful promises to those who would keep the divine commandments, and they read as follows: "The Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey; a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass." As we read these words we might apply them to many countries besides the Canaan of that older day; indeed, they would be specially applicable to this great country, to America, for all the conditions here mentioned exist, so far as material sense goes; but those who are willing to look below the surface realize fully that all these things and many more—everything, indeed, of which material sense gives evidence—would never reveal to humanity the promised land of human hope and faith.
In the eleventh chapter of Hebrews we find that Abraham, a great spiritual idealist, left the place of his birth because he must have freedom in which to find God and serve Him, and we have this remarkable passage: "He went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country." We thus see that even when he reached Canaan it was to him a strange country, and the reason for this immediately follows, "For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." Students of the Bible cannot fail to see that after the children of Israel had overcome many enemies and proved in very wonderful ways the infinite power of good when spiritually understood, when they were in complete possession of the land of Canaan, they yet failed to realize the land of promise for which Abraham looked; and those of them who were the most spiritually minded confessed, as we read in the chapter already quoted, "that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth."
The student of Christian Science would have no difficulty in identifying the promised land as the realm of infinite Mind, and would see that those who look for it in any material place, or expressed through material conditions, would fail to find it, and this for the reason that we must escape from the bondage of mortal and material belief before we even start on this great journey, where we find fresh hope and strength at every step of the way. On page 226 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy says: "I saw before me the awful conflict, the Red Sea and the wilderness; but I pressed on through faith in God, trusting Truth, the strong deliverer, to guide me into the land of Christian Science, where fetters fall and the rights of man are fully known and acknowledged." It goes without saying that the land of promise must be governed by the one perfect Mind, and that it must be the realm of law. It should also become clear to us that we shall not be ready to realize the ever presence of this land of promise so long as our highest desire is to think of it as confined to any one country or people; and happily for the hopes of humanity, this is becoming more fully recognized.
