THE student of Christian Science discovers that many of the determining objects and circumstances of his everyday life are not what they have always seemed. When he has attained even a slight spiritual elevation of thought, he can account for what he now knows to have been false phenomena; for he sees that he has been walking in a distorting haze. As he begins to grasp spiritual realities, he perceives that mortals are neither more nor less than unhappy children of the mist. His new wisdom may not spell his own immediate deliverance from the confusing folds, but it will turn him toward the possibilities that lie beyond and above. The same truth that enabled him to make his discovery confers upon him the ability to climb,—to climb up from the gloom of the material senses into the glory of divine Mind. "Corporeal sense, or error," Mrs. Eddy has written in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 299), "may seem to hide Truth, health, harmony, and Science, as the mist obscures the sun or the mountain; but Science, the sunshine of Truth, will melt away the shadow and reveal the celestial peaks."
Many a student of Christian Science measures his progress by his deliverance from one illusion after another as he has come to see that the woeful besetment had no existence except as a shape in the mist that went up from the earth. An illusion of one student was that there was a bond which held him to the ground, and thus harshly limited his capacities and activities. He had no mental freedom at all when mounting to a height. The visiting of a dome or an observatory was a difficult proceeding, in which one hand at least must maintain a firm clutch upon a rail. From childhood he had not been able to get into a swing without distress. Through many years a disturbed physical balance had meant the upsetting of the mental poise. Peace appeared to reside in contact with the earth, and stability to come, not from above, but from beneath.
One of the earliest revelations that Christian Science brought to this student was that he kept his feet on the ground through fear. He saw that the mist in which he had been moving and living was a pall of fear. Yet even after the nature of his chains had been disclosed to him, the chains continued to seem very real. In the old days there had been occasional acts, involving a certain curious heroism, in defiance of what claimed to be a ruling power; and now there began a mental wrestling which must go on until freedom should come through the breaking of the claim of that false but pretended power. The struggle, it developed, was not to be a brief one, and not without its discouragements and humiliations.
