Many years ago a small family came in sub-zero weather to occupy a primitive cabin on a northern wilderness frontier. Because they lacked experience, the fire in their rude fireplace burned out during the first night, posing a problem. But the next day, while calling on distant neighbors, they found the solution. The newcomers were to cut a large green log and place it at the back of the hearth, building the fire in front of it. This was called the backlog. It would burn slowly and hold the fire throughout the night.
Confronted with what appear to be overwhelming difficulties, men and women today often find on their mental hearths only the cold ashes of spiritual incapacity, ineptitude, and lack. Mortal beliefs, godlessness, self-will, ignorance, and conceit encourage the encroachment of cold chance and fate, seen in effect as frustration, futility, and failure. In appropriate metaphor the Scripture states (Prov. 26:20), "Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out."
To what shall mankind turn from the dilemmas of evil? How can we establish the sure foundation of dominion over human derelictions, over the empty mortal concepts of poverty, loss, fear, sin, grief, sickness, and death, which seem to be present? Christian Science answers that to succeed, thought must be turned understandingly to a source outside the mortal senses, beyond the limits of scholasticism and the teachings of ecclesiastical sects, above the falsities of material self-sufficiency, to the inviolable law of God, infinite good, which this Science reveals and explains.
