That is what the husband of the Shunammite said long ago.—"It is neither new moon, nor sabbath." On the morning of a day, the child who had come to their home through the clear, clean, kindly understanding of the man of God, the child who was the very gladness of spring to them, had gone out to where his father was, in the field with the reapers. Overwhelmed with cruel suddenness, the little boy had been taken home by one of the servants to his mother's care. And now, at noon, the husband of the Shunammite finds her bent upon a strange, hasty pilgrimage. He does not know that the child sat upon her knees for a while, then died. He does not know that the small body is hidden from sight, in that chamber on the wall so long devoted to Elisha the prophet. He does not know! How should he know—too busy even to leave the fields of his material reaping for the sake of the sufferer. The sweat of his brow is in his eyes. This much is borne in upon him, however; his wife is determined upon a journey to Mount Carmel. She must go to the man of God, she says. It will take a beast of burden and a servant away from the work. The harvest waits. And his protest, as it comes to us from the fourth chapter of II Kings, is the stupid, half sullen protest of mortal mind down to our very day: "Wherefore wilt thou go to him to-day? it is neither new moon, nor sabbath." And the answer was, and is, the only answer. Not argument, not entreaty, but the simple statement of the truth, "It shall be well."
Do we not love the Shunammite as she comes to Mount Carmel, reaching out for a better understanding, while from the quivering mother lips, in response to Gehazi's inquiry which the prophet sent him to make,—"Is it well with thee? is it well with thy husband? is it well with the child?" there comes once more the exquisite cry of truth from her troubled heart, "It is well." Spiritually minded herself, this woman was not looking to the mere bodily presence of Elisha for help. Even in the old days, when she had first seen the glow of the Godlike man on his face, when she had set aside the chamber on the wall that he might turn in thither, she had deferred to physical sense not at all. "A bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick"—it was enough. And so she who had left the dead body of her hope behind was turning now to the immortal manhood of God's creating.
Our well-beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, cosmopolitan of all the centuries, who has cleared away miasma-breeding mists of ages with the bracing language of to-day, has said on page 206 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," "Does God send sickness, giving the mother her child for the brief space of a few years and then taking it away by death?" And we hear the Shunammite's voice ring with the mellow tone of this same triumphant denial of such unlikeness of Love, "Did I desire a son of my lord? did I not say, Do not deceive me?" Strong in her soul's determination, she demanded, not a dead body, but a son—of God. Scorning physical personality she would not follow the material staff on which the prophet leaned, as it went, all to no purpose in the hands of Gehazi,—Gehazi the believer in substance-matter, Gehazi the greedy, Gehazi afterwards the leper. No; the Shunammite laid hold on the divine Principle of deathless man, and that Principle raised her son to life through the insistent realization of the absolute unity, the fitting together, the inseparability of Principle and idea. Mind and its manifestation, Life and its forever reflection.
