A great leader stood on the shore of the Red Sea. His followers were complaining bitterly— their lives were in danger. Certainly, Moses was facing not merely a sea of water, but also a sea of mortal mentality filled with material concepts and surging with elements of fear, malice, and woe. It seemed to be a desperate situation; but did Moses flee from it? No, he faced it with steadfast reliance upon God, whose divine law was working to lead the children of Israel safely out of Egyptian bondage. Prayerfully keeping in closest relation with God, he must have lifted his thought above the material concept of the situation to the divine order of being, since forthwith came the command from Mind, "Lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it." What could this mean, when interpreted spiritually, but to reach across the turbulent waters of mortal thought with the spiritual understanding which divides the light from darkness, and separates the spiritual real from the material unreal?
With such a distinct line of demarcation drawn between Truth and error, how could material images and mortal concepts resist the spiritual forces of Mind? How divinely natural that this understanding, separating the real from the unreal, should affect the phenomena of mortal thought and so divide the Red Sea, until on the solid basis of Truth demonstrated the children of Israel could make their passage safely through the very waters before which they had stood in consternation. Courageously did Moses prove the dominant power of spiritual understanding to rule not only the elements of mortal thought but also the visible forms of belief in matter, and thus to command the course of human affairs.
Today not only individuals but nations, amid the surging conditions of world-thought, are facing a Red Sea, figuratively speaking, and many are crying out, "We are all at sea; we do not know which way to turn." A definition of "at sea" is "confusion, bewilderment." In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 536) Mary Baker Eddy refers to "the sea," in St. John's vision, as "a symbol of tempest tossed human concepts." Have not most of us at some time faced a Red Sea of material mentality, and perhaps plunged into its depths of despair as did Jonah; or felt ourselves sinking into it when, like Peter, our faith failed us; or, like Paul, been shipwrecked upon it, and saved only by the grace of God? Filled, indeed, is the human so-called mind with erring concepts and lashed by the passions of human nature, typified by a troubled sea; and mortals, believing in these concepts, are often tempest-tossed and mentally shipwrecked.
