LEAVING THE FALSE LANDMARKS

ALL of humanity seems to be victimized more or less by a belief in a thing called the past. What we seem to be to-day is more or less a result of this false claim; for there is in each human consciousness a belief of human parentage with its supposedly inherited tendencies, either good or bad, of a childhood either happy or unhappy, of an education either thorough or superficial, of a home environment either helpful or pernicious—of all sorts of experiences, some uplifting, some debasing, through which we are constantly seeming to pass, and which claim to leave their indelible impression upon us. We appear, so to speak, to be the composite result of what we have been in the past; and we shall continue so until we learn through the blessed teachings of Christian Science that, as John says, "Now are we the sons of God."

Some one has rightly said, "The gods we serve write their names on our faces." A human countenance is not drawn and lined and made unlovely by the emotions of just one day. These things are the result of years of wrong thinking. They are the accumulated evidence of all we have been through in the way of human experience, of the times when we have been error's audience, listening without protest to its lying arguments of a selfhood apart from God, and of the times when we have been error's mouthpiece, also doing its talking for it and perpetuating its false evidence. Nor is the face the only thing upon which the marks of anxiety and fear and overindulgence and resentment and self-will and pride may leave their impress. Neither is the face the only part of the body which becomes changed and softened and harmonious and beautiful as the human consciousness habitually cultivates thinking of a better sort: the whole body, so called, feels the transforming touch of Truth, and responds as naturally and sweetly as some Æolian harp responds to the touch of the winds which sweep across it. That it is all a mental process, hence within the possibility of accomplishment, is clearly stated in our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy (p. 208): "You embrace your body in your thought, and you should delineate upon it thoughts of health, not of sickness."

In view of all this, should not a more persistent, systematic effort be made to eliminate from one's daily thinking all that is plainly destructive to health and happiness? Yet by an odd perversion, the so-called human mind seems to cling with great tenacity to the very things of which it has most need to let go; and one of these is its belief in the past. The average human mind is much like the average storage house, full of all sorts of useless and discarded things, so worn-out and faded and dusty that they should have been dispensed with long ago. Yet how we cling to them, these memories of the past, these things which we all have stored away in consciousness, these hard and heart-breaking and tragic experiences through which we believe we once passed! How we get them out and dust them, and shake them, and turn them over, and tenderly pack them away again, these things which we should be forgetting! How we actually seem to love to dwell on them, to keep them alive, to repeat the story to others, to pity ourselves because of them! And yet how heavily we pay for the privilege of keeping them! There was once a person who for thirteen years paid four hundred and twenty dollars a year to keep some old furniture in storage; but this sinks into insignificance in comparison to the price we sometimes pay for keeping unpleasant memories alive.

Did some one in the past make us unhappy, do something wrong, unjust, unkind, perhaps unspeakably cruel? It is quite possible; for such things happen to all of us. But why keep looking back at it? It is over; and, however wistfully we gaze, not one iota of it can now be changed. We all know what happened to Lot's wife when she looked back. She turned into a pillar of salt. In other words, her joy died, her faith died, her gratitude died, her hope died, and she became cold and bitter and loveless and petrified. Does not the habit of looking back mournfully or longingly into a past which cannot be recalled, and which is now incapable of change, strike a deathblow at the very source of activity and progress itself? Our Master was not heartless but divinely wise when he said, "Let the dead bury their dead." We have found in Christian Science this more excellent way. Mrs. Eddy tells us in Science and Health (p. 324), "Gladness to leave the false landmarks and joy to see them disappear,—this disposition helps to precipitate the ultimate harmony."

It is written in the book of Ecclesiastes: "I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him. That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past." This is surely a thought startling enough to give us pause. "God requireth that which is past." God "requireth" it, or demands it of us—requires us to give it up, to relinquish all belief in it, to lay it on the altar. This is the sacrifice which He requires of every faithful follower; and the sweetest part of it all is that in doing this, in turning our dead past with all its sad, haunting memories, over to God, we lose it. That is, we lose the bitterness of it, the sting of it, the anguish, the vain regret, to find instead that all we have really lost has been our false concept. We find, as one of our loved poets has said,

and all of bad the past hath had was never true, was never real, because God never made it. Why, then, should we continue to allow it to cling to us, like some horrible nightmare? For that is all it ever was, even when we believed ourselves to be going through the experience — just a bad dream of our waking moments, never possessing any real substance, life, activity, truth, power, presence, or permanence.

Let us, as Christian Scientists, stop dishonoring God, we who claim to love and revere Him and His infinite allness. Let us refuse to dishonor His holy name and nature by acknowledging another creator and another creation. Let us begin at once to draw a line of absolute demarcation between the always-false and the forever-true, by asking ourselves in regard to each experience in this so-called past, Did God make it? This question will be answered in every case quickly and completely, if we will apply to it the touchstone of the following inspired statement in Science and Health (p. 525): "Everything good or worthy, God made. Whatever is valueless or baneful, He did not make,—hence its unreality." The word "baneful," according to a dictionary, means "injurious; noxious; pernicious, that which works mischief or destruction." Let us take this word, then, and ask ourselves concerning any past experience if it might be considered as all or any of these things, and, in addition, valueless or of no real account, empty, unnecessary, superfluous, useless; and if so, we know beyond a shadow of doubt that God did not make it, hence it was not made, and never in reality existed or happened.

Now, in the light of all this, let us bring out all these hidden things from their dark corners in this mental storage house of ours, and make an end of them, right here and now. Let us bring them all, without one single reservation, even to that very hardest experience of our lives, the very worst thing which ever seemed to happen to us, the remembrance of which has perhaps changed and darkened our whole lives—or, at least, so we have been until now believing. Let us bring every one of them: that grave mistake we made so long ago, that wrong decision in a critical moment, that backward step under stress of temptation, that unkind thing which somebody did and which we cannot seem to forget, that injustice of which we were the innocent victim, that misunderstanding which separated friends, that disappointment which darkened life's sunshine for us, that hour when Isaac was laid on the altar, that starless midnight struggle. Not for a moment is it to be supposed that one can, as by a wave of the hand, entirely forget these things. In our present feeble state of spiritual progress that would be almost impossible. But we can destroy to-day, if we so wish, and destroy forever, the sting of them, the cruelty of them, so that hereafter we shall remember only the lessons, the opportunities, which came because we were compelled to turn more wholly and unreservedly to God.

"God requireth that which is past." In loving obedience to this divine demand, let us quietly and dispassionately realize that what is called our human history, its sorrows and defeats, its mistakes and failures, its disappointments and bitter disillusionments, its lost opportunities, its agony and remorse, may be dropped from our thinking as we lift our thought above it all in the glad realization that at last we are to be free. These baneful and valueless things God never made; and we do not need to carry the burden and pain of them for another hour. Error has no history,—no beginning, no end,—for error never was, in reality.

As we ponder these things, let us imagine ourselves standing on the deck of some huge ocean liner just ready to start upon its voyage. All that we really need to help us on our way we have on the ship with us; and all that would only obstruct and retard our progress we have discarded and laid in a pile on the wharf. We gaze at it half in amazement that we could have carried all this useless baggage about with us for so long without a protest. What a motley collection it all is; what an unlovely, miserable, hopeless tangle of accumulated evidence, all wrong and all unnecessary! Does it seem possible, now we actually see it in the light of day, that we could have been so deluded and victimized as to have dragged it along with us, wherever we went, through all these weary years!

But see, the boat is moving! Silently we stand and watch the land recede. Dimmer and dimmer grow those outlines of the past, those false landmarks, which never marked anything that was true or real, until at last they all melt away and there is nothing left but the open sea, the cloudless sky, and the fresh strong winds of heaven, speeding us on our way. Then, with a gratitude in our hearts too deep for words, we draw a long breath of relief, and with joy and gladness turn away forever from that poor little pile of rubbish left behind. Thus we are helping "to precipitate the ultimate harmony."