Watching Point 234

234 — WATCH lest you believe that you will need protection from the wind of error all your days, lest it blow out your spiritual flame. Will progress bring the demonstration that will enable you to know that the wind only causes your spiritual fire to burn more brightly? Surely this was true in the case of our Leader.

Protection from the winds must belong to the baby stage, where one’s spiritual fire has not yet been kindled brightly. Protection in one’s advanced stages is gained by reversing error upon itself, knowing that every effort evil makes to blow out one’s spiritual fire, only causes it to burn more brightly.

When Gilbert Carpenter was at Mrs. Eddy’s home she taught him this rule of protection. She instructed him to handle every claim by knowing that he was the better and stronger for it, that every effort of error to harm him, only made him better and lifted him higher.

Let us suppose a claim of epidemic was rampant. How would you handle it? Could you not realize that error never created anything and never could. Therefore, the only epidemic must be the presence of God’s encircling love, which mortal sense is distorting, and so we are stronger and better for Love’s presence, and safe from all harm.

One sad thing about sickness under mortal mind is that every attack leaves mortal man weaker and more fearful. Every time he is thrown down, he is weakened. In mythology we read about the giant, Antaeus, who was the son of Mother Earth. Every time he was thrown down, he rose up with renewed strength, infused into him by his contact with his mother. Thus we can realize in Christian Science that every time error claims to throw us down, it only serves to put us in contact with our Father-Mother God, from whom we derive a constant renewal of life.

Mrs. Eddy discerned the need of advanced students applying the rule of reversal, which is a law of Truth applied to human experience, namely, that we are stronger for every experience, and our flame burns more brightly, as error tries to blow it out. When we meet the attacks of error in this way, so that we become stronger under affliction, error will cease this mode of attack and attempt a different one, namely, human harmony.

The prodigal son came back stronger and better for his contact and conflict with error in Egypt; while the elder brother disintegrated under the human harmony he experienced in his father’s house. If we establish the habit of meeting error by reversing its claims and knowing that we are better for it, we shall be prepared to continue this warfare, when the more subtle phase of human sense confronts us, namely, human harmony, or a sense of God’s absence that carries no warning of the danger. Human harmony represents bondage to the belief in harmonious matter, which carries less warning than the belief in discordant matter.