THE Bible tells us in the second chapter of Daniel that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had a dream that troubled him greatly. In this dream he saw a "great image" whose form was "terrible." The head was of gold, the breast and arms of silver, the belly and thighs of brass, the legs of iron, the feet of iron and clay. He also saw a stone that was "cut out of the mountain without hands." This stone smote the image on its feet, and broke them to pieces. Then the rest of the body was broken into pieces, "and the wind carried them away." The stone that destroyed the image "became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth."
The king asked Daniel to interpret the dream. In his interpretation Daniel designated the parts that composed the image as kings or kingdoms bearing "rule over all the earth." After he had analyzed the parts of the great image, had told the king what each part represented and shown that every part would be destroyed, the prophet gave to the king this wonderful prophecy about the stone that destroyed the image, as recorded in the forty-fourth verse of the second chapter of Daniel: "And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever."
The image was composed of gold, silver, brass, iron, and clay. These five substances may be likened to the five material senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. In her definition of matter, as given in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 591), Mrs. Eddy says of it that it is "that which mortal mind sees, feels, hears, tastes, and smells only in belief." As the image composed of five parts was only a dream, so the five material senses are only a belief. Yet they seem to form images of sin, sickness, and death sometimes more terrible to mortals than the great image Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream. These false beliefs rule mortals, and hold them in bondage until their unreality is demonstrated by the understanding of Truth.
