MANY years ago there lived a saintly man, even the beloved disciple, John, whose principal theme was love. And because he greatly loved, opaqueness was not permitted to becloud his consciousness. He was a man of spiritual vision; and, naturally, such a nature had little in common with worldliness. Standing unflinchingly as he did for the testimony of Christ Jesus, it was not strange that one day he was banished by the Roman emperor, and sent across the sea to a small, lone island. Now what did this man of spiritual vision do about it all? Did he resent the injustice and bitterly complain? No! Looking beyond his immediate environment and circumstances, he was caught up of Spirit, whereby, through the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth, he transcended his human experience.
Had you and I been there, we might have seen a solitary figure standing on the shore of the sea in deep and penetrating thought, as he looked out across the waters. We read in Revelation that John saw a great beast with seven heads and ten horns rising up out of the sea. And what might this sea and this beast represent? In the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy (p. 559), the term "sea" is referred to as "elementary, latent error, the source of all error's visible forms." And as for the beast, did it not typify materiality and animality? John must have looked not only over the sea of mortal mind, but also down into its seeming depths; for he depicts vividly the intrigue and chicanery of the inner recesses of mortal mentality.
Indeed, all the hidden phases of sin were revealed to this man of vision; but, after seeing all there was of the claims of error, he beheld another vision—a city flooded with light, in which there was neither curse nor darkness. Then decisively he stated. "And there was no more sea." In other words, as John recognized the sea, with its beast, as typifying mortal mind and its concepts, evil was no longer a mystery, nor could it seem real to him. Before the brilliance of the spiritual vision which illumined his thought, how could there be any night, any darkened consciousness of evil? How natural that the material sense of heaven and earth should pass away, even as night disappears before the morning light! That which had exiled him in its attempt to make useless his life-work had proved powerless to keep the gates of heaven from opening to his ascending thought. Not only did John perceive that evil in all its seeming awfulness was unreal, but he also gained the spiritual victory over it. So did this beloved disciple demonstrate the perfect modus operandi of dealing with sin through the spiritual light which outshines error. Concerning John's experience on the Isle of Patmos, Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health (p. 571), "With his spiritual strength, he has opened wide the gates of glory, and illumined the night of paganism with the sublime grandeur of divine Science, outshining sin, sorcery, lust, and hypocrisy."
