“Awake, thou that sleepest”

In Mr. Abbey’s pictorial setting of the legend of Sir Galahad and the Holy Grail, he has very successfully portrayed in the knight’s pose and expression, his utter discomfiture at the moment when he finds that he has forgotten the magical word by which he was to have broken the spell of spiritual death that bound King Amfortas, with all the inmates of the Castle of the Grail. At that moment his call, his consecration, his high purpose, his years of devoted preparation for the demands of knighthood,—all counted for naught, because he had not retained right consciousness. Until this awakening was realized, his holy quest must fail, and there was left him only the remembrance of a lost opportunity, the companionship of self-reproach.

The story reminds us of the frequent Scriptural references to this mortal life as, “a sleep and a forgetting;” and of the teaching of Christian Science that whatever of weakness and inadequacy may characterize our present Christian endeavor, it is explained by our fearsome forgetfulness, the feebleness of our grasp upon fundamental truths of Being,—the allness of God and His manifestation, the dignity and authority of man, the nothingness of evil, and the powerlessness of mesmeric belief in the presence of spiritual understanding.

The more common thought, perhaps, of spiritual development is patterned after the growth of a seedling. A center of life assimilates nourishment, enlarges its bounds, its strength, its fruitage, and ultimately reaches the completion of its kind. This figure serves our convenience, but it very imperfectly expresses the nature of our growth into the realization of the divine likeness. This is not a process, it is an awakening, a perception, a discovery of what is, and the significant gain of this true concept is in its sensible elimination of the time element. The generally accepted necessity of this factor means weakness of faith, and according to our faith so is our demonstration.

The tempter would have us content ourselves with slow progress, with modest demonstrations over evil, by reminding us of the naturalness and consequent legitimacy of this order. But we know that God’s thoughts do not come to their perfectness by accretion. “The rays of infinite Truth, when gathered into the focus of ideas, bring light instantaneously” (Science and Health, p. 504). We know, therefore, that this human sense of limitation may pass away at once and forever, as the figment of a dream. Says the Psalmist. “I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.”

It is clear that in the ideal, to escape from the delusions of materiality is to be aroused from our Adamic torpor at the noonday of that spiritual manifestation whose glorious effulgence awaits now. our vision. “If sickness and sin are illusions, the awakening from this mortal dream, or illusion, will bring us into health, holiness, and immortality. This awakening is the forever coming of Christ.

. . . This is the salvation which cometh through God, the divine Principle, Love, as demonstrated by Jesus” (Science and Health, p. 230).

The immediateness of the possibilities of faith is not realized as yet in human experience, but the perception and maintenance of the ideal very significantly conduces thereto. The day has its dawn because of the visual obstruction of the earth, and, similarly, spiritual realizations are retarded, not because of any reserve in Truth’s radiation, but solely because of the disabling earthiness of human sense, and our repose in its seeming.

It is the mission of Christian Science to awaken sinners (Science and Health, p. 342), among whom all are numbered; and its loving appeal has so far broken the material slumber of many that they are opening their eyes to the day. They now see that the listless face and the idle hands of inefficiency are the signs of our forgetfulness of God and of the Christ-man. They are quickened and impelled by a higher sense of love, of purity, of unselfishness, of duty, and of freedom than they have known before, and they love and honor her who, in faithfulness to the divine impulse and command, has awakened them from a condition of thought and life which is “as a sleep.”