“Awake Thou That Sleepest”

by Frederick Dixon

Published as a pamphlet in 1917 by The Christian Science Publishing Society, now in the public domain. Presented in e-book transcription as a gift of love by cslectures.org.



“The ‘still, small voice’ of scientific thought reaches over continent and ocean to the globe’s remotest bound. The inaudible voice of Truth is, to the human mind, ‘as when a lion roareth.’”

— Mary Baker Eddy




Table of Contents




procrastination

The human mind riots in procrastination. It is true that it has made such an idol of the habit that its perpetual obeisances pass almost unknown to itself. At the same time, if the man in the street would be entirely frank with himself, a luxury which is one of the few he is always ready to practice self-denial over, he would discover that the proverb, “Procrastination is the thief of time,” is true not only as an abstract relative fact, but as a common truism in the practice of his own and his neighbors’ lives.

When Jesus said, to the disciples, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” he by no means meant, as some people would like to believe, never do today what you can put off until tomorrow. Nevertheless, after eighteen centuries of scholastic and popular theology, Christendom is composed, as Carlyle might have said, of so many millions mostly tomorrowists. In exactly the same way, Mrs. Eddy wrote, on page 485 of Science and Health, “Emerge gently from matter into Spirit.” Numbers of readers regard this, without a qualm, as advice to take your time in the process of obeying Paul’s advice to “let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” To them gently becomes quite naturally a synonym for slowly. The diver, however, who comes to the surface gently, and without a ripple, invariably does so much more quickly than the one who emerges splashing and beating the surface.

The truth is, of course, that the struggle to know more of Principle cannot be carried on too persistently. The human mind loves relaxation. It makes a law for itself that a certain amount of relaxation is not only desirable but good, not only good but necessary. It, indeed, gets almost angry if its neighbor points out that metaphysically this is a fallacy, and that humanly it is a matter of opinion — of individual demonstration. There is such a thing as making your own limitations a bludgeon for your neighbor. That one man’s meat is another man’s poison is obvious in the realm of human action. It is only in the realm of the spiritual, or absolute, that law operates scientifically, that is, without variation. And so-called law which varies is not law, but an average of chances.

Mrs. Eddy reduces the whole matter to its true proportion when she writes, on pages 519 and 520 of Science and Health, “The highest and sweetest rest, even from a human standpoint, is in holy work,” and this is absolutely unquestionable when the work is accomplished metaphysically. It is when work is not accomplished metaphysically, when the elements of human will, human desire, human fear, are allowed to enter in, that seeds of dejection and exhaustion begin to sprout, and so excuse is provided for that procrastination which appeals so irresistibly to the senses through which the human mind is expressed. Sleep, for instance, which is the very pivot of materiality, is only an attenuated sense of death. Jesus put this quite plainly when he said, to the disciples, “Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.”

After all, what is the difference between sleep and death, but one of degree? The man who goes to sleep at night wakes in the morning in his room. The man who dies awakes in another room, in another sphere. But if he had conquered sleep scientifically he would have overcome matter and death. Jesus actually roused Lazarus out of the sleep of death, as an ordinary man wakes another out of ordinary sleep. This, however, was because he knew sleep and death alike to be unrealities. His disciples, who were so spiritually dense that they answered him, speaking of Lazarus, “Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well,” could not have done this. Believing that sleep was good, they believed that death was real, and so, no doubt, that a man ought to take a little time to himself, just, as it were, to assure himself that he was a man.

Now it is quite true that no man knows more truth than the truth he can demonstrate. That, however, is no reason why he should lessen his own power of demonstration by enacting fictitious laws for his neighbors. He must remember that his neighbor, like himself, becomes a law unto himself in the exact proportion in which he assimilates truth, and this is an absolutely scientific fact, because the more truth he assimilates, the more absolutely he becomes obedient to law. Now it is quite certain that the only way to assimilate truth is, as Mrs. Eddy says, on page 392 of Science and Health, to “Stand porter at the door of thought.” To be found anywhere, consequently, where you are not in a position to stand porter at the door of thought, is simply to delay your own progress, and as such to become obedient not to law, but to the claim of procrastination, which, as Young so truly said, steals your time.

All persons know perfectly well whether they are remaining porter at the door of thought or not. They know perfectly well whether what they term relaxation is relaxation from the consciousness of Principle or not. If it is relaxation from the consciousness of Principle, it is a loss of time. It may be that they do not know sufficient truth to make the demonstration of remaining porter at the door of thought for more than a certain number of hours a day, and that the rest of the day has to be spent in relaxation, in rest, or some other sort of forgetfulness of the demands of Principle. In such circumstances they are a law unto themselves, but they should not try to be a law unto their neighbor as well, and to decide how much relaxation that neighbor requires. When they do interfere in this way, they are demonstrating, not Principle, but their own officiousness.

The simple fact is, that every minute taken from the study of divine Science is a loss of time. Mrs. Eddy has made this plain again, and again, and again, in her writings. On page 3 of Science and Health, she writes, “The Divine Being must be reflected by man, — else man is not the image and likeness of the patient, tender, and true, the One ‘altogether lovely;’ but to understand God is the work of eternity, and demands absolute consecration of thought, energy, and desire.” This sums up the situation. Exactly to what extent the individual is capable of maintaining this consecration is his individual problem, and it is one he had best work out for himself without any question of what is good or otherwise for his neighbor. One thing, however, he may always remember, and that is the extremely homely proverb that “Procrastination is the thief of time.”




lions in the path

There are few things more fatal to successful demonstration than discouragement. It is, of course, a form of mental weakness nourished on ignorance and materiality. Mrs. Eddy makes this very clear, on page 329 of Science and Health, when she writes, “To be discouraged, is to resemble a pupil in addition, who attempts to solve a problem of Euclid, and denies the rule of the problem because he fails in his first effort.” Yet a great number of people who turn, for one reason or another, to Christian Science, fall into this particular “Slough of Despond.” It lies, as Bunyan pointed out long ago, between every man and Principle, though he put it a little differently. The narrow way drives right through its midst, and the pilgrim will have to sink the fascines of endurance and understanding, under his feet, every inch of the road, if he is to reach the other side, and, even then, when he reaches the “Wicket Gate,” he will find it a veritable needle’s eye, whilst his own material dimensions are still those of the camel. Paul summed the whole thing up many times in his letters to the Christian churches, for Paul in his struggle from sense to Soul had to meet and master all the lions which prowl along this particular path. The writer of Proverbs confined the expression, of course, for his own purpose of illustration, to one peculiar phase of the materiality of the human consciousness: “The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets,” an epigram the man in the street himself has converted into the homely proverb, “Lions in the path.” All the same no one knows better than the man in the street that slothfulness is only one of the many lions which roam in the streets of the city of “Good Intent,” and produce discouragement of every description. Slothfulness itself is nothing but the mesmerism of the disinclination of the individual, mentally, to bestir himself, and the more material the individual outlook becomes, the greater becomes the disinclination to use the mental faculties. The more the individual permits his thought to travel along material, and therefore sensual, lines, the more real matter becomes to him, and the less real, consequently, the power of the human mind as well as the divine Mind. What is commonly known as a bovine mentality is only a mentality governed supremely by a belief in the reality of matter, and in a corresponding extinction of mind. Such a mentality necessarily and naturally produces slothfulness, and this slothfulness manifests itself in the disinclination to in any way exert the mentality. When such a condition is reached the human mind begins immediately to find excuses for its own inaction, and these excuses are the lions in its path.

Now once a man is beset by these lions he frequently leaves the street clear to them, and seeks refuge in his house. In other words, having found a reason for not exerting himself, he becomes more and more reconciled to his surrender to matter, and gradually he approaches the mental condition when any exertion is a terror to him, because some lion or another roars at his appearance in the street. After a time the lions, so far from becoming a terror, become his chief argument for a slothfulness which has become not only natural but delightful to him, and he resents to the full the idea, put forward by his neighbors, that if he would face the lions resolutely they would run, and if he pursued them, they would disappear. Instead of that he prefers to go on sleeping in his house, not perceiving that this very wish for sleep is the mesmerism which ultimates in what is known as death. “Sleep and apathy” writes Mrs. Eddy, on page 249 of Science and Health, “are phases of the dream that life, substance, and intelligence are material.” Jesus made this quite clear, to the disciples, when he told them that Lazarus slept. To the man who taught daily in the temple, and who by night abode on the Mount of Olives, death was nothing but a prolonged sleep of the human mind. The disciples, less metaphysical than their Master, declared that if Lazarus slept, he would do well, but Jesus knew that sleep, though actually a necessity to the human consciousness to the exact extent in which that consciousness believes in matter, was, none the less, like every other material phenomenon, however legitimate from a human point of view, a surrender to that sense of apathy which, as Mrs. Eddy says, is founded on the belief that life, substance, and intelligence are material.

The man in the street is convinced that he needs sleep, because he is convinced that his body is a material substance, and that the life it manifests requires sleep to preserve it, and also to maintain the intelligence which is supposed to reside in the material substance of the brain. But, as the man in the street begins to understand divine Science, he begins to realize that life, substance, and intelligence are not material but spiritual, and as such are not subject to material considerations or material laws. His demonstration or proof of this is made in overcoming the so-called material laws, and proving that they are not laws. As he proves that sickness, that hunger, that sorrow, are purely mental conditions, and can be destroyed mentally, he begins to perceive that all material phenomena are of a similar nature. Then he realizes that as a man learns to comprehend Spirit, he learns to do without sleep, and that this knowledge of the unreality of sleep will teach him, here or hereafter, to conquer death. But prove the unreality of matter he cannot, so long as his mentality which, to do this, has to rebel against the laws of matter, is held in bondage by slothfulness, and frightened by the lions in the street.

A man’s sense of discouragement, then, is bounded by his materiality, for belief in materiality is nothing more or less than an absence of spiritual perception. If he really understood that life was spiritual, the claims of matter could not discourage him, in any way, for he would see them as nothing but a lie which could be disproved and so destroyed. The beginner in Christian Science does dimly perceive this, in a glass darkly, but his very inability to demonstrate what he believes, is a proof of his own want of belief. The father of the deaf and dumb child put this into words forever memorable, when he exclaimed, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!” That phrase, Mrs. Eddy declares, on page 23 of Science and Health, “expresses the helplessness of a blind faith; whereas the in junction, ‘Believe … and thou shalt be saved!’ demands self-reliant trustworthiness, which includes spiritual understanding and confides all to God.” As a man reaches that self-reliant trustworthiness he ceases any longer to trouble about the lions in the street, for he realizes his power to overcome them, because he has ceased to be a slave to material slothfulness, and has instead consented to let that Mind be in him which was also in Christ Jesus.




could ye not watch with me one hour?

The secret of success is consecration. On page 462 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy makes this supremely clear, when she explains that divine healing can only be demonstrated by means of a scientific adherence to Principle, though she goes on to insist that “There is nothing difficult nor toilsome in this task when the way is pointed out; but self-denial, sincerity, Christianity, and persistence alone win the prize, as they usually do in every department of life.” This is all so obvious that every one is willing enough to agree to it; and yet, in spite of this obviousness, no one plunges very deeply into the battle with error without learning the full force of Paul’s despairing saying, “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” No one who understands anything at all about Principle is, of course, in the least deceived as to what this means, whether they are prepared to act up to it or not. What stands between every man and Spirit is the veil of matter, the lasciviousness of the flesh. When as Mrs. Eddy says, the effort is sincere enough, sufficiently persistent and supported by real self-denial, when, that is to say, the effort of the laborer in the vineyard is based on real consecration, this veil of the flesh can be rent. But when there is hesitation, a halting between the flesh and the Spirit, a sympathy with materiality, the veil of the flesh is apt, if even partially rent, to wrap itself about the intruder, as the spider’s web enmeshes the fly, and then follows the wail, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

What is the body of this death except the belief in sentient matter? This material body is the subjective condition of material thought, and it is necessarily precisely as material as the mind which projects it. Mrs. Eddy writing, on pages 476-7 of Science and Health, of Christ Jesus’ method of healing, says, “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick.” This is the metaphysical, and the only metaphysical way of healing the sick. The purity of Jesus’ consciousness enabled him to see that man had not a sentient material body. He resolved, in plain English, things into thoughts, and, as a consequence, he saw God’s idea instead of its material counterfeit, and seeing this he was able to deliver the human being from his body of death, because the only body he was capable of accepting as real was a spiritual idea. This, however, was only possible to Jesus because he had, persistently and with sincerity, exercised that self-denial which is a denial of a material self.

Now this demonstration is not made, and never has been made, by chattering about Principle. It is made, if it is made, in the course of a stern conflict which has for its object the denial of the material body and the human self, and the recognition of the perfect man, the idea of divine Mind, the image and likeness of Principle. The unreality of death, in short, is not demonstrated by the attempt to prolong the existence of a lie, but in the effort to comprehend the eternity of Truth. For precisely as a man gains this knowledge of Truth, he is freed from the imposition of the corresponding lie. So that the realization of the eternity of the divine idea, delivers a man from this body of death, this belief in a carnal body growing out of dust or dead matter, and returning to dust or dead matter.

Jesus put the whole question quite plainly before the world when he said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” All students of the Greek text of the Bible know that the Greek word here translated life really means soul, and all students of Greek and Hebrew philosophy know that the soul was to the Hebrew or the Greek nothing more or less than the expression of sentient matter. Mrs. Eddy has brought this out, with marvelous clearness, on pages 481-2 of Science and Health, in the words, “When reading the Scriptures, the substitution of the word sense for soul gives the exact meaning in a majority of cases.” In the light of all of this it is clear that when Jesus spoke of a man laying down his soul for his friends, he meant not his human life but his belief of life in matter, in other words his sensuality or belief in sentient matter. In getting rid of this he would necessarily surrender his belief in a carnal mind, and develop more and more his understanding of divine Mind. In doing this he would, then, begin to see, more and more, the perfect man instead of the sinning mortal man, and so begin, in turn, scientifically to heal the sick. What greater love could anyone show to his friend than a conquest of his own sensuality so complete that it would enable him to help to lift that friend out of that belief of sensuality which is death? It was Paul’s appreciation of the necessity for the effort to conquer his belief in sensuality by his understanding of Principle which inspired the regret of his words, “For the good that I would I do not”; and it was surely his appreciation of his failure to live up to his own highest sense of right which made him add “but the evil which I would not, that I do,” a realization which drew from him that other sorrowing admission, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” or who will enable me to lay down my sensuality for my friend?

It was the mesmerism of this sensuality, against which Paul cried out, that overwhelmed the disciples themselves, in the garden of Gethsemane. Not even the appeal of Jesus to watch with him was powerful enough to subdue that evidence of the senses, that sleep which is death, in the moment of their Master’s struggle. Had they joined with him in the effort to destroy the belief of death, the story of Christianity might have been different. As it was, because they had not conquered their sensuality, their belief of life in matter, they yielded to their belief in the refuge of sleep which some day ends in refuge in death, and which once before they had unconsciously yielded to when they said of Lazarus, “Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well.” So Lazarus slept, and they slept, and Jesus came and found them asleep, and said unto them, “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?”




the senses and sleep

When Paul, writing to the Galatian church, declared that the Spirit lusted against the flesh and the flesh against the Spirit, he referred, of course, to the perpetual effort of the material senses to drown any spark of spiritual perception in a sea of materiality. When, writing to the Romans, he declared the evil that he would not that he did, and the good he would he did not, he laid emphasis again on the same fact, and when later, in the same letter, he demanded who would deliver him from the body of this death, he connected the entire belief of birth and death, of material existence, that is to say, with the effort to submerge the spiritual instinct in this sea of materiality, thus, through the very apathy to Truth engendered by sensuality, bringing about the inevitable material incident known as death. So long, consequently, as the human being remains awake to the demands of Spirit, he remains more or less impervious to the suggestions which ultimate in sin, disease, and death. But it is just here that the lusting after apathy, produced by the perpetual lusting of the flesh against the Spirit, wears down, so constantly, the effort of the human being to, as Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 392 of Science and Health, “Stand porter at the door of thought.” What inevitably follows is the apparent victory, for the moment, and in the particular instance, of the flesh over the Spirit. The human being lapses from spiritual consciousness into material unconsciousness, since every mental state in which Spirit is not predominant is, to that extent, unconsciousness. “The parent of all human discord”, Mrs. Eddy writes, beginning on page 306 of Science and Health, “was the Adam-dream, the deep sleep, in which originated the delusion that life and intelligence proceeded from and passed into matter.”

Now all apathy is part of the Adam-dream. It is all a phase of the dominant sensuousness of the human mind, which takes refuge, from the insistent demands of Spirit, in the mental inertia which is itself only a form of the Adam sleep, and which always finds for the victim an excuse for yielding to it, by arguing to him that he must rest periodically, from the demands of Spirit, by yielding, in the sweet reasonableness of common sense, to the demands of the body. To the man in the street the argument is a perfectly sound one. He admits the reality of matter, he acknowledges the validity of physical law, and therefore in bowing to what he imagines are the demands of the body, he shows at once, to his own satisfaction at any rate, his common sense and his scientific acquaintance with law. In the case of the Christian Scientist this is different. He denies the reality of matter, and insists that the only reality is the divine Mind, and, therefore, he is in a position to demonstrate the saying of Mrs. Eddy, on pages 519 and 520 of Science and Health, that “The highest and sweetest rest, even from a human standpoint, is in holy work.”

It is, therefore, naturally against work that the human mind makes its most pronounced protest. It does not, of course, insist that work is bad, but it does insist that work should be reduced to what it calls a reasonable minimum, and though it is not so particular about the definition of that minimum for its neighbors, it commonly indulges in the perpetual effort to reduce the minimum to a vanishing point for itself. In plain English, it is wholeheartedly on the side of what, on page 2 of the Message to The Mother Church for 1900, Mrs. Eddy calls the intermediate worker. “The intermediate worker”, she writes there, “works at times. He says: ‘It is my duty to take some time for myself; however, I believe in working when it is convenient.’” It is this belief of taking some time for himself which is, as Shylock says, the badge of all the tribe. Yet to the man who understands the lusting of the Spirit against the flesh, and the flesh against the Spirit, to the man who knows the insidious temptation referred to by Paul, when he declared that the evil that he would not that he did, and the good he would he did not, the full force of Mrs. Eddy’s warning should be apparent, and he should begin to see why Jesus so emphatically defined sleep as death, and so persistently denounced what Mrs. Eddy describes as the Adam-dream.

The most material age has always been the most sensual, whether it be that which produced the appalling society of Rome under the Caesars, or the cyclone of intellectual materialism which men call the Renaissance. On the other hand, the great bursts of spiritual light have always been moments of intense material depression. The martyrs of the Early Church passed through tortures, whether at the hands of the Roman emperors, or of the familiars of the Holy Office, which could never have been faced by the Roman patricians of the era of Commodus or the Italian princes of the Italy of the Renaissance. The martyrs of the Coliseum, like the heretics of the market-place, were, however, men and women intensely alert to the voice of Spirit: they were standing perpetually porters at the doors of thought, and so kept out of their minds that sensual abandonment to matter which produces at once the most ecstatic sensual enjoyment and the basest fear of material pain. They were, to use the illustration of Jesus, the wise virgins, who had kept the wicks of their spiritual lamps so trimmed, and the reservoirs of their spiritual consciousness so filled with oil, that they were ready at any moment of the day or night to open the doors to every spiritual messenger that knocked upon them. The Roman ladies of the age of Commodus, the Italian nobles of the Renaissance, were the foolish virgins. They slept literally and figuratively. Day and night they were asleep in the senses, and may, indeed, be said to have fulfilled the quaint epigram of the Chinese sage, of passing from the inaction of sleep to the greater inaction of being awake.

Now, it is a simple physical fact that sensualism is akin to sleep, and that the more the human mind gives way to sensuality, in whatever form, the more it is overwhelmed by sleep. The belief, therefore, in pleasure or pain, gained through the senses, is the mesmerism which lulls the human being to rest, the rest of mental apathy and physical sleep, and so places him, in a measure, beyond the help of those spiritual impartations which, in disturbing his apathy and waking him out of sleep, produce a mental condition, at least better able to assimilate Truth than that which he was enjoying before. Principle, Mind, Spirit, it is certain never sleeps. Therefore the fact of being asleep means that the individual is to that extent separated from Principle. God neither slumbers nor sleeps, therefore this is true also of the image and likeness of God. The human being, the counterfeit of the divine Mind, is compelled by his own material belief both to slumber and sleep, but the periods of slumber and the hours of sleep grow less in proportion, as Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 312 of Science and Health, as “What to material sense seems substance, becomes nothingness, as the sense-dream vanishes and reality appears.” Therefore, said Jesus, “What I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.”




sleep

The poets, on the whole, have been great materialists, and that, it is to be supposed, is the reason why men in every way so unlike as the authors of “Hudibras” and “Queen Mab,” have seen so clearly the invisible link between sleep and death. The alternative would be to credit them with a peculiarly metaphysical insight, for only the materialist or the metaphysician could so clearly see the connection: the one from the very depths of his belief in matter, the other from the clearness of his perception of the unreality of matter. Thus Homer sings, in the Iliad, of “Death’s brother, Sleep” whilst, on page 65 of her Poems, Mrs. Eddy writes, “Ah, sleep, twin sister of death and of night!”

The ubiquitous man in the street of Emerson does not, of course, realize what matter even hypothetically is. To him it is “lumps of stuff,” such, for instance, as Dr. Johnson’s paving stones. Yet, four centuries before the Christian era, Plato was contending against the view which still appealed to the common sense of Dr. Johnson twenty-two centuries later, and which goes on appealing to the Dr. Johnsons of today in spite of all the arguments of Bishop Berkeley or Lord Kelvin. As a matter of fact, however, all that even the idealism of natural science has accomplished has been to insist that matter is unreal inasmuch as it is a mental phenomenon or a manifestation of energy. This, be it said, only makes the human mind more material than granite, or energy more solid than pig-iron. The reality, in short, is shifted back from the phenomenon of granite or pig-iron to the noumenon or cause of human mind or energy. Consequently the man who sees sleep and death as states of mind is more purely a materialist than the man who sees in them the physical action of matter. Thus Homer writing of “Death’s brother, Sleep,” or Shelley telling of “Death and his brother Sleep,” though their psychology is separated by centuries, are just as completely materialistic in their philosophy as the great doctor in Fleet Street, or the man in the streets of Concord. The true idealist then is not Plato, is not Berkeley, is not even Lord Kelvin. It is any follower of Jesus of Nazareth who understands his teachings sufficiently to imitate, in some degree, his healing works, for these healing works are the miracles or signs which Jesus himself gave in demonstration of the truth of his metaphysics, and which, in turn, he demanded from his followers. The idealism of Jesus, however, differed fundamentally from that of Plato, or Berkeley, or Lord Kelvin, in that it denied the reality not only of the material phenomenon, but logically and uncompromisingly of the material noumenon or cause. Jesus stated this, indeed, in the language of his day, in the east, in the most unequivocal terms. “That,” he said, to Nicodemus, “which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit,” and this the writer of the Fourth Gospel, speaking of all those demonstrating spiritual perception, paraphrased in the famous passage, “Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” Now, in exactly the same way that Jesus contrasted matter and Spirit, he used sleep as a synonym for death. “Spirit,” he said, to the disciples, “hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have,” whilst he also told them that Lazarus slept, meaning by that that he was dead. There was, however, this abysmal gulf fixed between the teaching of Jesus and Homer, that whereas the Greek and his successors have regarded death and sleep as equally real, Jesus knew that one was as supposititious as the other, and that both were counterfeits of spiritual ideas, and so unreal.

There is no mistaking what Jesus thought about sleep. Not only did he describe it as death in speaking of Lazarus, but in the parable of the virgins as in the actual incident in Gethsemane, he defined it as the hypnotic influence of materiality. In just the same terms, Mrs. Eddy exposes sleep for what it is, when she writes on pages 306-7 of Science and Health, “The parent of all human discord was the Adam-dream, the deep sleep, in which originated the delusion that life and intelligence proceeded from and passed into matter.” Sleep, then, is the expression of pure matter, that is of human mind or energy, as manifested in the birth or death of matter. Jesus knew perfectly well that neither the sleeping forms of the virgins, nor those of the disciples in Gethsemane were anything but material phenomena of which the cause, on the relative or physical plane, was the hypnotism of sensuality or sleep. “The allegory of Adam,” Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 17 of “Christian Healing,” “when spiritually understood, explains this dream of material life, even the dream of the ‘deep sleep’ that fell upon Adam when the spiritual senses were hushed by material sense that before had claimed audience with a serpent.”

In the case of sleep and death the distinction between the two is, as in the case of all purely relative conditions, one of degree; and by relative, of course, is here implied any condition neither absolute nor spiritual. Sleep is a necessity to the human being who believes in death, because sleep and death are degrees of the belief of life as material, and so finally having a beginning and an end. If a man knew life to be eternal he would know it to be spiritual, and so never to need what Butler describes as the restorative of sleep, since it is impossible for a finite material action to affect an absolute spiritual condition. Jesus taught the exact contrary of the Butler philosophy. “This is life eternal,” he said, “that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” In other words, he taught that the true restorative of the human frame was the understanding of spiritual Truth, or the Christ, which would overcome the necessity for sleep. Jesus, moreover, proved this throughout the entire length of his ministry. The demonstration of the Science he taught lay in proving that the physical laws, which make a man sick, which demand the oblivion of sleep, and which ultimately cause him to die, were not laws, but an ignorance of true law or the Christ. A man who suffers from insomnia believes in some physical law of sickness, but if he could grasp, even partially, the fact that life is eternal, the fear of insomnia would be broken, and he would be able to sleep. If he really understood the law of divine Principle expressed in eternal Life he could, of course, go much further than this, and do without sleep at all. This is truly what is implied in the Gospel saying with respect to Jesus, “And in the day time he was teaching in the temple; and at night he went out, and abode in the mount that is called the mount of Olives.” It was in the night vigil, on the Mount of Olives, that Jesus found the restorative of Life which enabled him to teach the next morning in the temple, because it was there he restored his understanding of the Christ. “The foxes have holes” he said, “and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”




night

Every one knows that marvelous description of night, which the Herr Professor poured out, as he peered down, over the gabled roofs of the great spreading city, wrapped in smoke shot only with the dull gleam of fingers of lamplight. It is a terrible enough picture too, for it leaves the reader with a horrified sense of the vice and abandonment of a city under the cover of darkness. It is curious how from the beginning of time darkness and fear have gone hand in hand, so that they have, in all ages, been synonymous with evil. The ancient peoples of the east treated them as the equivalent of chaos, and it was this, unquestionably, that Milton had in mind when he wrote the familiar lines:

“A shout that tore hell’s concave, and beyond
Frightened the reign of Chaos and old Night.”

Milton, of course, was familiar with the Bible, and, without doubt, knew by heart the thunderous grandeur of the Book of Job, “A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness.” But the same cannot be said of Ovid, who wrote:

“Proh superi! quantum mortalia pectora cæcæ Noctis habent!”

which being interpreted is:

“O ye gods! what darkness as of night
There is in mortal minds!”

Now what all this means is perfectly clear. It is that the primitive instincts and educated senses of men have led them surely to suspect, even to fear darkness. “Quantæ sunt tenebræ! væ mihi, væ mihi, væ!” is the old medieval saying, “How great is the darkness! woe to me, woe to me, woe!” The figure of speech employed by the medieval writer made use of darkness to convey the idea of spiritual blindness, just as Jesus himself made use of night, in the parable of the foolish virgins. The spiritual blindness, indicated in the metaphor, was, however, paralleled in the physical sleep in the garden of Gethsemane, and brought precisely the same consequences. The foolish virgins were barred out of the kingdom of heaven, for their sensuous sleep was the product of that carnal mindedness which is death, so that the voice of Principle answered their cries, and said, “Verily I say unto you, I know you not”; whilst of the sleepers in Gethsemane, Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 47 of Science and Health, “The disciples’ desertion of their Master in his last earthly struggle was punished; each one came to a violent death except St. John, of whose death we have no record.”

In that terrible night struggle in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus of Nazareth was engaged in battling for that absolute vision of the Christ, which, in the recognition of the eternity of Life, comprises the conquest of death. In this contest he asked his disciples to take part, by meeting and overcoming the mesmerism of night and sleep, through the recognition of the metaphysical fact, later stated by John himself, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” In spite of this, their sensuous belief in the harmlessness of and necessity for sleep betrayed the disciples into sleep, so that at last Jesus abandoned them to the mesmeric influence of night and the hypnotism of sleep, with the mournful words, “Sleep on now, and take your rest.” None knew better than he the price of that sleep.

Now, all this does not mean that there is any virtue in the effort to give up sleep by will power, but it does mean that in the proportion in which sleep is conquered, death is conquered. Accordingly the sooner it is recognized that sleep is not harmless and is not a necessity, the better for the man who is determined to prove the spirituality of Life, and so eventually to overcome death. No man, for instance, can arbitrarily give up food and drink. If he did he would substitute the greater errors of starvation and death for the lesser errors of food and material existence. But he can give up being a wine-bibber and a glutton. He can, that is to say, gradually wean himself from the material pleasure of eating and drinking, until he eats in order that he may live, and not for the pleasure of the occasion. It is precisely the same with sleep. But in order to give up sleep, as in order to give up any other sensual pleasure, a man must be convinced of the unreality of matter, so that he may recognize that that which he is giving up is not a harmless phase of material existence, but rather a phase the harmfulness of which has hitherto been veiled. There is no harmless phase of material existence.

Probably had the foolish virgins not waited in the night, and had not the struggle in Gethsemane taken place in the darkness, the virgins and the disciples alike would have risen superior to the mesmerism of the occasion. Both the virgins and the disciples had, however, behind them the world’s mental belief in the evil of night and the power of darkness. The ancient peoples had expressed this belief when they undertook the worship of the moon. Later the moon, as the queen of night, was endowed with all the sensual attributes of the night, and the improving human thought turned in preference to the worship of the sun. In this way the moon became the type of the worship of the lusts of the flesh, in their most material forms, and so it was that the woman clothed with the sun had the moon under her feet. Sleep, then, became the surrender by mankind of their senses during the night, whilst darkness became the typical cloak for the commission of all sins. The metaphorical expression of this is to be found through and through the Bible. “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep,” is the way in which the writer of Genesis gives expression to the metaphor of primeval chaos. Centuries later the Christian author of the Book of Revelation, explaining by means of one metaphor the meaning of another metaphor, showed the world the unreality of night and darkness in the description of the city which lies four square: “And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it.” This was a city, the spiritual city, which was not built with hands, and of this city the Revelator declared that in it there shall be no more death.

“Ach, mein Lieber!” sighs the Herr Professor, down there, below the roofs, “under that hideous coverlet of vapors,” in the “stifled hum of midnight,” men are dying and men are being born, and the rest lie weltering like salt fish in a barrel, each struggling to get its head above the others. “Such work goes on under that smoke-counterpane.”




day

It was a true instinct which animated the ancient peoples when they turned from worship of the moon to the worship of the sun, from the queen of the night to the lord of the day. This change indicated true progress, albeit, on the lines of idol worship. Almost for the first time men were casting behind them the shadow of their fears, and beginning to recognize the power of light and Truth. The sun myth, as typified in the worship in turn of Merodach, of Apollo, or of Bel, and ultimately in the kingship of Arthur Pendragon, was, at any rate, more elevating and less mischievous than the moon myth woven round the zigurat, round the dragon, round Tiarmat, or portrayed in the ruin of the Round Table in “that great battle in the west.” It would, in short, be curious, if it were not inevitable, to look back and see how, persistently, if slowly, through the centuries, the ever improving human thought has strode from out of darkness toward the light. The secret of this is hidden from the unredeemed human consciousness, but it is to be read, in a measure, by every man who has ever seen, in any degree, the vision of the Christ. In the old folk tales, or rather in one of the innumerable old folk tales, of the struggle between light and darkness, the battle continued long and furiously, until, at last, light thrust a mass of tow into the mouth of darkness. This tow gradually swelled and swelled, until finally the body of darkness or evil was shattered into fragments by the increasing pressure, and the victory of light was assured. This surely is just what Mrs. Eddy implies, on page 476 of Science and Health, when she writes, “Error, urged to its final limits, is self-destroyed.” What Mrs. Eddy was showing, in that passage, was that as the vision of the Christ grows clearer and clearer to human eyes, the lie about God and man must cease to deceive. In other words, as the quotation continues, “Error will cease to claim that soul is in body, that life and intelligence are in matter, and that this matter is man.” This unfoldment is what, on page 584 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy calls “God’s day,” or, to quote the entire passage, “The objects of time and sense disappear in the illumination of spiritual understanding, and Mind measures time according to the good that is unfolded. This unfolding is God’s day, and ‘there shall be no night there.’” Day, then, is the light of spiritual understanding, night the ignorance of human-belief. And this ignorance finds its natural expression in the surrender of all material consciousness to sleep. With the dawn, however, comes the severing of this mesmerism. The recognition of this came even to the primitive man, as he watched the red circle of the sun, flashing into gold, as it rose out of the black abyss of water which his fears pictured as well nigh omnipotent evil:

“Him let us praise; the golden child that rose
In the beginning, who was born the Lord —”

So wrote the eastern poet; and, indeed, throughout the entire east, the sunrise was, to the dweller in Babylon or Chaldæa, the beginning of created things. It was the inspiration of his religious fervor; it was the very fons et origo of his philosophy; it gave expression to his first feeble conception of a god, who was a good and not a malignant deity; it was, in short, his earliest picture of a First Cause, God. These earliest instincts of the primitive, eastern mind still find their expression in the man or woman of today. It is because of this that their emotions respond to the external manifestations of sunlight or cloud, and it is because of this that the promptings of evil claim domination under cover of darkness, and those of good when the glory of the morning rules. To the man in the street these are mere varying emotions which he attributes to his temperament. But the metaphysician knows better, he knows that it is the so-called law of heredity, the supposititious influence of material education, above all, that it is the fearfulness bred of the senses, which is claiming to control him. As, consequently, he denies the existence of any law but that of Principle, as he goes to school, as it were, to Spirit rather than to matter, he discovers the law which is Principle, and for the relative ignorance of a material cultivation substitutes a spiritual and metaphysical understanding of Principle. Thus sunrise, which, to the primitive man, constituted his earliest and most potent concept of a miracle, becomes to the metaphysician an optical delusion sustained on ignorance. As Mrs. Eddy so truly says, on page 6 of “No and Yes,” “To material sense it is plain also that the error of the revolution of the sun around the earth is more apparent than the adverse but true Science of the stellar universe.” Obviously then as a man gains a more metaphysical understanding of the universe, he gains a truer conception of what day and night mean, and he begins to realize the practical necessity of demonstrating the knowledge so obtained. He finds that there is a deep significance in physical conditions and phenomena which he once dismissed as the inevitable operations of nature. He learns that there is no nature outside the realm of Spirit, and no law, save the law of Principle. Therefore, he discovers that he is not controlled by physical nature, but has “dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.” Consequently, it becomes clear to him that he cannot consent to be governed by the emotions of light and darkness; to be directed when he shall be glad and when he shall fear, when he shall sleep and when he shall remain awake.

This, then is the lesson of day, that light is the symbol of spiritual Truth, the type of all that is real, and that darkness is simply ignorance of this. Even the natural scientist admits that light is positive, and darkness a mere negation. He demonstrates this by the experiment which shows that you can create light, but that the only way in which you can produce darkness is by the exclusion of light. It is this belief in the equality of light and darkness which has led the human being, rioting in his sense of materiality, to shut his eyes to Truth. One day, however, waking, like the Babylonian of old, to a sense of the horror of material darkness, he begins to see the truth shining as it were in the darkness, though the darkness comprehendeth it not. So, little by little, the truth comes to the wakening human consciousness, and man shakes off, little by little, the old mesmeric beliefs which thrive in sleep and darkness. Thus he passes, in his growing vision of the Christ, out of darkness into life, for in the words of the apostle, written to the Christians in the very high place of all materiality, “the night is far spent, the day is at hand.”




narcotics

The significance of the word narcotic is admirably illustrated in the old Greek story which is supposed to have given birth to the word itself. Narcissus, the son of Cephisus, says Ovid, was captivated by the reflection of his own person in a certain fountain. Mistaking this for the nymph of the fountain he strove to reach her, with the result that he was drowned. In the place where he disappeared there grew up the flower named, after him, the narcissus, the eating of which is supposed to produce the numbness of drowning or of the sleep of death. Out of this, then, there gradually grew up the term narcotic, meaning anything soporific, anything producing drowsiness, stupor, or insensibility. Now anybody who understands anything about the methods of the human mind knows that a drug acts in the exact ratio of the potency attributed to it by that mind. The difference, for instance, between opium and tobacco is solely inherent in the fact that the human mind endows the former with the power to reduce the smoker to insensibility, whilst it limits the power of the latter to that merely of a sedative. It is, therefore, obvious that the real narcotic, relatively speaking, is not the poppy nor the tobacco plant, but the belief about these in the human mind. Thus a man drugs himself not with the essence of a distilled plant, or the leaf of a sun-baked one, but by the mental pictures conjured up in his own consciousness. “Mortal belief”, Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 174 of Science and Health, “is all that enables a drug to cure mortal ailments.”

Once all this is perceived the student of Christian Science begins to comprehend how he may drug himself not alone with camomile or whiskey, but with envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness; how he may succumb to narcotics not only in the shape of morphia and tobacco, but in the shape of lust, idleness, and dilettantism. And from this he learns that the final empire over these things is only gained when you reduce them to terms of nothingness. The man who believes in a body will always be subject to lust: the only way to prove your mastery over sleep is by remaining scientifically awake. “The depraved appetite for alcoholic drinks,” writes Mrs. Eddy, on page 406 of Science and Health, “tobacco, tea, coffee, opium, is destroyed only by Mind’s mastery of the body.” And this mastery is acquired just as quickly as the human mind surrenders its belief in the reality of matter, in the face of the overwhelming fact that the image and likeness of Spirit must be spiritual and not material.

It is consequently evident that anything which numbs a man’s spiritual perception, everything which dulls and puts to sleep his consciousness of Truth, must act upon him as a narcotic. The drunkard is just as completely under the influence of a drug as is the laudanum drinker; the man governed by malice is as completely in a state of coma as the man controlled by opium; for this condition of drunkenness or this state of coma is, in the one case as in the other, solely the result of the domination of the flesh, originating in an absence of spiritual control. When, in short, a man goes to sleep as the effect of a narcotic, and wanders, in his dreams, freed from his body, throughout the realm of mortal mind, he may be less subject to the stupor of evil than when he is, apparently actively and intelligently, giving free rein to his appetites and passions, and clutching, in the frenzy of stupefied sensualism, like Narcissus, at the reflection of his own thoughts, mirrored in the fountain of materiality. The narcotics of the pharmacopœia are, then, only certain well defined instances of the effect of mental morphia on the human mind. What Mrs. Eddy wrote, on page 247 of Science and Health, of physical life, “The acute belief of physical life comes on at a remote period, and is not so disastrous as the chronic belief”, is essentially true of the whole range of mental narcotics. At the mere enumeration of the better defined types, morphia, opium, laudanum the world holds up its hands in pious horror, whilst to the chronic types, summed up, with such pitiless exactness, in Paul’s great letter to the Galatians, it either turns a blind eye, or disassociates them from the category of narcotics altogether. Yet what is Paul’s category but a summary of mental passions, which, manifested physically, drug a man’s mind, and mesmerize his body through the effect of a mental narcotic, which stupefies him so completely as to nullify any effort he may be inclined even to attempt to make to clarify his perception of Principle: “Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings and such like.”

Paul, of course, took his teaching from the preaching of Christ Jesus, just as Mrs. Eddy did, centuries later; and Jesus, equally of course, was never tired of insisting on the effects of what may be termed the Narcissus example. When he told the story of the husbandman in whose corn, whilst men slept, the enemy sowed tares, what did he allude to but the habit of the men to yield themselves prisoners to the narcotics of mortal mind? And when, again, he told that other story of the waiting virgins, what did he allude to but man’s surrender to the narcotic of ease in the senses, at the very moment when he ought to be claiming his spiritual birthright? Or, to take another instance out of the history of the primitive church, what happened to Eutychus on that night when Paul preached, till midnight, in that upper room, in the narrow street at Troas, in Mysia, lit by the lights of the house? The New Testament is perfectly clear upon the subject. Seated by the open window, he yielded to the hypnotism of the senses, already so drugged with the narcotic of materiality as not to be able to withstand its mesmerism. These, obviously, are, as it were, examples taken, haphazard, from the text of the New Testament. They illustrate, however, quite admirably the lesson, which begins in Genesis and ends in Revelation, of the claim of animal magnetism to govern the material universe by deadening the human mind, through the temptations of the flesh, themselves the handmaidens of the belief in narcotics, until the victim is delivered at the gate of hell, bound hand and foot, with the fetters of self-indulgence. After all, this hell is only the mental suffering which follows, as the night the day, the surrender to the phantom of desire, of evil, indeed, in any guise. Therefore was it that Paul thundered to the Ephesians, “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”

Frederick Dixon.

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Love is the liberator.