In the twenty-fourth psalm we find this spiritual command repeated: "Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in." It is said that this psalm was written to signalize the formal entry of David and his followers into the citadel on Mount Zion, the last place to be ceded to those who acknowledged only one God, one Mind. It is also said that this place was the stronghold of the Jebusites, who offered an armed resistance to the advance of the Israelites after all the other tribes inhabiting Canaan had given way before them. Although it had long been believed that the position of the Jebusites was impregnable, yet when a clearer understanding of the one God became the leader of the advancing hosts of the Israelites, its conquest was certain.
This psalm is indeed wonderful, as studied from the viewpoint of Christian Science; for although David had come to be recognized as a mighty warrior, and was followed by a train of tried and faithful soldiers, yet there is no tone of mortal conquest in the psalm, which begins, "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein." We are then told that only he "shall ascend into the hill of the Lord" who "hath clean hands, and a pure heart." With this high spiritual demand resting upon them, the warriors marched up to the gates of the citadel and asked that they be opened, that the King of glory might come in. The thoughtful student of Scripture is well aware that this conquest meant a great moral and spiritual victory, and that so long as spiritual sense with its attendant righteousness prevailed, the city was safe from outside foes.
From this passage thought travels across the centuries to the time of Christ Jesus, when Jerusalem was under the domination of the Roman power which had "gods many, and lords many," and when the Jewish people themselves had largely lost sight of the pure religion established by patriarchs and prophets, and had come to depend upon ceremonial religion and a cold intellectualism which separated man from God and shut out the recognition of the divine ever presence which alone can give stability to any religion or any nation. The great Teacher offered, not only to his fellow countrymen after the flesh but to all men, the truth which lifts humanity above sin, disease, and death; and while a few accepted it and were healed, the representatives of scholastic theology rejected it and sought his destruction, quite ignorant of the fact that in this way they were most surely working out their own.
