The Smell of Fire

The story of the three young Hebrew captives’ deliverance from the fiery furnace is loved by many. One point has been of great interest to many people. After Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were finally released, not only were their clothes not burned and the hair of their heads unsinged, but not even “the smell of fire had passed on them.”

What, metaphysically speaking, is the smell of the fire? Is it not the remembrance of it, the sting of it, the resentment over it? “The smell of fire” is the admission that an evil happened. It means that evil has a history, and that although the fire is out now, it once existed and we were in it. So insistently does this last argument cling to consciousness, that some of us go through the fire, and everyone smells smoke on us for years afterwards. When this is the case, can it be said that we, like those three men of long ago, have come through the experience untouched?

Let’s refuse to allow error to attach itself to us in any way, shape, or manner. Its claim that it once had activity, presence, power, cause, or law is false, and should be seen and handled as error’s last, desperate effort to stay alive in memory since all else has failed. Let’s refuse to admit that evil ever had either a beginning or an ending. Let’s refuse to admit that it ever was at all, even for one moment. It doesn’t help us eliminate “the smell of fire” from our garments if we drag the remembrance of it around with us wherever we go, brooding over it in private, talking about it in public, and taking a melancholy delight in remembering its unpleasant details. It won’t grow less by any such procedure. Let’s refuse to be scarred-up Christian Scientists. We don’t have to be. Let’s just be Christian Scientists who have learned our lessons and gone up higher.

Often, what keeps alive “the smell of fire” is self-pity. We feel so sorry for ourselves, and encourage others to feel sorry for us. Few things are more dully stupefying than sympathy. Human sympathy tends to strangle its victim in the python coil of what it impudently calls “love.” Under its influence, even that high and holy thing called “mother love” has sometimes been perverted into that which might better be termed “smother love.” It assumes the phase of evil hardest to detect, namely, evil coming in the name of good, something which puts us off our guard more quickly than anything else in the world. Evil coming in the name of evil fights in the open. We see it in all its hideous forms, and recognize it for what it is; but evil coming in the name of good puts on the garments of heaven, calls itself “love,” and slips into thought undetected.

One of the best antidotes for self-pity is given in Miscellaneous Writings: “Thou shalt recognize thyself as God’s spiritual child only, ­— the true man and true woman, — all-harmonious, — of spiritual origin, God’s reflection.” Once we recognize ourselves in our true identity, what is left to pity or to be pitied? Is “God’s spiritual child” ever an object of commiseration?

There is something else, besides self-pity, which helps to keep alive “the smell of fire,” and that is self-condemnation. Either one, alone, is bad enough; but when they go hand in hand, as they often do, one might as well step back into his fiery furnace and stay there a while longer; for his demonstration is not made. Self-condemnation presupposes that evil has a history, and that we were identified with it. It tricks us first into admitting that there was a fiery furnace heated “seven times more than it was wont to be heated.” Then it argues to us that we did get out of it, but not as quickly as we should have. Let’s refuse to accept any argument that keeps alive a belief in a material past. Why not forget “those things which are behind,” as the apostle says, and press forward?

What a wonderful thing it would be, if everyone who had ever passed through a trying ordeal would come out of it “every whit whole,” with head erect and shining eyes, with a greater love for God and man, deeper gratitude, and a stronger faith.

“Beloved,” wrote the Apostle Peter, “think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: but rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy . . . for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you.”

Let us never forget that it was right there, in the midst of the fire, that the Hebrew captives saw the vision of the Christ. Their human extremity was so great that they rose to a spiritual height, and beheld man as he really is, spiritual and not material. Even King Nebuchadnezzar saw the vision. “Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire?” he cried in amazement; “Lo, I see four men loose, walking, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.”

These heavenly glimpses of divine reality are not often gained in our hours of ease, but in those testing times when the utmost efforts of evil are put forth to destroy the Christ-idea for which we stand. Let us rejoice, that through great tribulation we gained the vision.

If the demonstration has been complete, this is what he who has just been released will say, if questioned about his experience, “Was it hard? I don’t know. The vision was so beautiful, I have forgotten all the rest.”