Untimely drowsiness has deprived many an individual of the fruits of alertness and vigilance. Dozing when one should be awake and watching gives evidence that one has ceased exercising the divinely derived faculty of reason; that animal magnetism, whose action is always to draw thought away from the spiritual, has dulled and stupefied thought, effectively mesmerizing it against the joy of heavenly inspiration. Upon one's ear, when one should have been attentive, may have fallen perfect phraseology and beauty of ideas, but because thought has become unresponsive to underlying spiritual values, the eye has automatically closed in sleep.
The human mind is particularly prone to indulge apathy toward spiritual concepts, although they have a direct and provable bearing upon human affairs, as Christian Science is demonstrating in the healing of all forms of discord. The first action of this practical Science of Christianity is to rouse thought from its apathetic acceptance of the reality of sin, sickness, and death and to challenge the basic premise of mortality—that matter is the source and conditioner of existence.
The Adamic theory of life, originating in the mortal mind dream of inert matter, is the illusive source of every discordant belief to which the human race seems subject. Christian Science corrects this fallacious concept with the spiritual truths of being, which are found in the first chapter of Genesis, wherein God is described as the origin and condition of man's life.
In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy writes (p. 556): "Did the origin and the enlightenment of the race come from the deep sleep which fell upon Adam? Sleep is darkness, but God's creative mandate was, 'Let there be light.' In sleep, cause and effect are mere illusions. They seem to be something, but are not. Oblivion and dreams, not realities, come with sleep. Even so goes on the Adam-belief, of which mortal and material life is the dream."
It is related in the twentieth chapter of the book of Acts that when the Apostle Paul was in Troas, he addressed the workers there at some length; in fact, he talked until midnight. In that faith-lighted company there was one, so far as the record shows, whose spiritual dullness carried him into the oblivion of sleep, and he was a young man named Eutychus. In the very midst of the vital truths being unfolded, he went to sleep, lost his balance, and fell from the third-story window in which he was sitting. Although the evidence of death was apparent, "Paul went down, and fell on him, and embracing him said, Trouble not yourselves; for his life is in him." And it is recorded, "They brought the young man alive, and were not a little comforted."
Paul's words do not imply any sense of life as a lurking, sometime inhabitant of inert matter, but they express his spiritual conviction that Life is God, continuously reflected in the divine idea, man, and that no physical circumstance can destroy it. Life is not subject to sleep, dreams, or death, and mankind will prove this fact proportionately as the Christly influence rouses thought from materiality to the divine standpoint of perfection as the true and only gauge of being.
Untimely drowsiness indicates an accumulation of materiality which gradually immobilizes thought, making it insensitive to spiritual inspiration. This unnatural state may be regarded as an extension of the Adamic sleep, in which cause and effect are held to be phenomena of matter, and birth and death are regarded as definitive conditions of being.
When Christ Jesus learned that Lazarus had died, he said to his disciples (John 11:11), "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep." Surely these words imply the Master's recognition that even death was not a condition of matter that needed correcting, but a state of thought which required arousing; and this was proven when Lazarus walked out of his tomb.
The Christ, which Jesus so fully exemplified, is ever present to waken men from slothful ease in physicality, deadened sensibility to spiritual values, and the dream of life in matter. It is the ever-active office of the Christ to rouse consciousness to spiritual views of life and being. Responsiveness to the Christly touch helps to break the centuries-old Adamic sleep, with its doleful dreams of sin, death, and sickness. Worldliness, with its stupefying influence, its indifference to things spiritual, will gradually cease to mesmerize the consciousness in which lofty desires have begun to stir and in which all that is noble and good is reaching out to God for fulfillment. This is the dawning of the new day, God's day, the light of which dispels the shadows of old beliefs and reveals man as the image of God, reflecting health, harmony, and immortality.
Spiritual inspiration unfailingly pours out upon the watchful, wakeful seeker. Intellectual, moral, and spiritual enlightenment sheds its healing rays upon the vigilant, loving, humble searchers for Truth as Christian Science reveals it.
Paul summarized this matter in his words to the Thessalonians (I Thess. 5:5, 6): "Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober."
