THERE are no barriers to the spiritual ideas or thoughts which proceed from divine Mind, for they are fetterless; nor can walls of mortal belief, however dense and thick they may appear, shut out God's power and presence or obstruct the operation of His law. In the very midst of seeming imprisonment within false belief, the door to right thinking will always be found open to individual receptive human consciousness. Truth may be mentally entertained and intelligently utilized at all times, and it always comes with power to dissolve false mental concepts, and to confer the ability to rise above material sense testimony on wings of aspiration. This was practically illustrated in Peter's experience, when the angel delivered him from prison, leading him past the guards, on through the gate, which opened at his approach and ushered him into freedom, thus proving that angels, God's thoughts, enter the receptive heart with power of deliverance as freely through prison bars as in free, open spaces.
The Psalmist sang, "The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth." Now it is plain that the call to God uttered in the truth, or the consciousness of His power, cannot be shut out either by visible walls or the walls of material sense. And Christian Science maintains that such a call also goes forth with power to pierce the seeming imprisonment of sickness and the seeming density of sin, whose false walls of separation between mankind and God are but the product of human ignorance of divine power, ignorance that lies at the root of all bondage.
Therefore, when seemingly confronted by materiality appearing as sickness, Babel towers of sin, or even the seemingly impregnable barrier of death, the student of Christian Science learns immediately to enlarge his mental horizon by lifting his thought above sense-testimony to the eager contemplation of such spiritual qualities as hope, joy, courage, and faith, which is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." He knows that such thoughts, individualized and utilized, ally him with divine power and confer on him a freedom impossible of attainment from the standpoint of a mere physical sense of liberty accompanied by material thinking which precludes the recognition of God's omnipotence.
