Recently I had a chance to study the allegory of the court case in Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (see pp. 430–442). I never really understood it until I decided to draw a picture of a court room and look up in the dictionary each term used, identifying it and then putting it in its appropriate place on my drawing. As a result, the allegory suddenly came alive.
One thing that stood out to me is, in the “Court of Error,” there is no defense attorney for the prisoner. In pondering this omission, I realized how true it was that in the Court of Error, when “Personal Sense,” a.k.a our five physical senses, decides something is wrong, there is only the rumination of all that is wrong, along with false conclusions of pain and discord.
I had an example of this when I was steam cleaning my carpet. I had propped a table on its side so I could lean it against the wall, when one of the large, heavy feet of this table fell on my foot. I was not wearing shoes, and it dropped hard enough to cause serious pain. The first thoughts that came to me were those of Personal Sense, the “plaintiff” in the Court of Error. It stated that there was pain and that, because of this, now weight could not be put on the foot. I immediately sat down on the carpet, and the conclusion being drawn from the Court of Error was that I was sentenced to having to refrain from using that foot for a while.
