Isaiah, beholding the corruption of an ancient king and prophetically seeing his great and glorious kingdom made as Sodom and Gomorrah, exclaimed, "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" The prophet is supposed to have based this metaphor on a Semitic myth that the morning star had fallen from heaven. Later, the poet Milton, seizing upon the same figure of speech, identified Lucifer with the rebel archangel, and, from that time on, this misconception has been very generally accepted. But Lucifer is also the name of the planet Venus when appearing as the morning star, and in its derivative meaning stands for the bringing of light. "Son of the morning," then, from this point of view, proclaims to the Christian Scientist the good day which in the words of a hymn so full of hope is thus expressed (Hymnal, p.176):—
A glorious day is dawning,
And o'er the waking earth
The heralds of the morning
Are springing into birth.
The student has the opportunity of following out either of these trains of thought. The first, as presented by Milton, indicates a banishment from all good with nothing left but the chagrin of defeat—without hope of restitution. The other, with its poetic imagery, leads thought forward to that state which Mary Baker Eddy with her unerring vision must have seen when asking the question, on page 535 of Science and Health, "When will man pass through the open gate of Christian Science into the heaven of Soul, into the heritage of the first born among men?"
