Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/224

204 commandment?” Until the lesson is learned that God is the only, Mind governing man, mortal belief will be afraid, as it was in the beginning, and will hide from the demand, “Where art thou?” This awful demand, “Adam, where art thou?” is met with the admission, from the head, heart, stomach, blood, nerves: Lo, here am I, looking for happiness and life in the body, but finding only an illusion of pleasure, pain, sin, sickness, and death.

The Soul-inspired Patriarchs heard the voice of Truth, and talked with God as consciously as man talks with man.

Jacob was alone, wrestling with error, — struggling with a mortal sense of life, substance, and intelligence

as existent in matter, with its false pleasures and pains, — when an angel, a message from Truth and Love, appeared to him, and smote the sinew, or strength, of his error, till it became powerless; and thereby Truth, being understood, gave him spiritual strength in this Peniel of Divine Science. Then said the spiritual evangel: “Let me go, for the day breaketh;” that is, The light of Truth and Love dawns upon thee; but the Patriarch, perceiving his own error and need of help, did not loosen his hold upon this glorious light until his nature was transformed. When Jacob was asked, “What is thy name?” he straightway answered; and then his name was changed to Israel, for “as a prince” had he prevailed, and had “power with God and with men.” Then Jacob questioned his deliverer, “What is thy name?” but this appellation was nameless and withheld, for the messenger was not a corporeal being, but an incorporeal impartation of God to man, which, to use