A STUDENT of Christian Science spent many vacation hours near a small inland lake, whose placid beauty served to illustrate some helpful lessons. During the summer, this quiet lake, nestling among wooded northern hills, usually mirrors the graceful white-stemmed birches and the tender green of the willow trees, with their background of dark pines. At times one can scarcely tell where the shore line ends and the reflection begins, but a boatman's quiet dip of a paddle is enough to disturb the tranquillity of the surface and mar the lovely reflected picture. A slight breeze, sending tiny ripples shimmering across the water, disturbs it even more. A wind passes over the surface, and the reflection is gone entirely.
The agitation of the water and the disappearance of the image bring no sense of depression or loss to the beholder, for he knows the images to be but the semblance of a more permanent scene. He needs only to lift his eyes to view the trees, undisturbed, unharmed, secure, despite the winds and waves that temporarily annihilate the reflection. The very fact that it can so easily be destroyed proves that it is not authentic or reliable in itself, though it presents, at times, an inverted image of a lovely landscape, close at hand. The disturbance of the water, however, serves to mark the shore line, and reveals the distinction between the sturdy trees above and the fleeting semblance below.
How like this transitory picture is the mortal concept of the universe and man, as matter! Because of its transient nature, it is constantly changing, being at one time attractive; at another, dreary and joyless. If a gust of belief in false material law passes over thought some phase of the pictured concept disappears from human view. This wind may call itself a law of sin, disease, old age, or death, that mars or wipes out a mortal picture that may have seemed pleasant to contemplate. It may come as a fluctuation in the financial world that shatters material prosperity. But under whatever disguise it presents itself, error helps to destroy itself—the erroneous belief that there can be life or substance in matter. Of this false concept of man Job says, "He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not."
