Article April 3, 1920 Issue

"The right intuition"

ETHEL ADÈLE DENNY

How often from the depths of belief in matter has the desolate human sense cried out, Oh, I don't know! Or that other more piteous cry, If I had only known! What might have been, had I only known! So cried Hamlet, charged with the command to act, but travailing in inactivity, not knowing how or when to act; and so cry all who believe that there is ever a time when man cannot know the right thing to do, who are putting their faith in the five senses as witnesses of Truth. So, while we bow our heads as we read, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him," we repudiate the availability of that wisdom when we accept as law any case in which a man fails to do the thing that he "would."

The man who pauses irresolute, not knowing what to do, will admit that his most valuable aid would be an unerring intelligence. He fails because of inactivity or mistaken activity. Now it is just this right thing to do that Christian Science has come to clarify. Mrs. Eddy says on page 152 of "Miscellaneous Writings," "Into His haven of Soul there enters no element of earth to cast out angels, to silence the right intuition which guides you safely home." Christian Science makes clear that there is never a time when man can be separated from that intelligence which eternally knows the right thing to do. Turning unreservedly to the one consciousness, man apprehends the right idea, the right answer. This must be so because God is eternally thinking and man, the image and likeness of God, must image God's thoughts or think with Him. How, indeed, could man think any other way, since God's thoughts, being infinite, must express all the Mind or intelligence there is?

But a man may insist: How free myself from the belief that there is a mind or brain apart from God, a mind that suggests the stupid, wrong thing to do? How can I tell the right intuition from the wrong? How can I think at all when my mind is troubled by horrid fantasies or dulled into sleep by thoughts that, dimly begun, circle as idly as gnats in a noonday haze? To this complaint of the human mind, Mrs. Eddy's answer in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 173) is serenely illuminating, "If Mind, God, is all-power and all-presence, man is not met by another power and presence, that—obstructing his intelligence—pains, fetters, and befools him."

Send a comment to the editors