Thinking in Hemispheres

The conference in Washington is affording the whole world an object lesson in the necessity of thinking in hemispheres. The necessity has always existed, but the understanding of it has never before been so clear. In Washington to-day the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race are joined with Latins from France, from Italy, and from the Iberian peninsula, with orientals from the Far East and from the Empire of India, with men from the Netherlands and the antipodes, and with the descendants of those old Belgæ whom Cæsar fought, in an effort to do what? To bring about the promise of that first Christmas morning, when the heavenly host sang together "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

Eighteen hundred years of Christian preaching has not done so very much to bring into practice the command of that Christmas morning, when the earth is covered with hundreds of nations, differing in speech, in faith, and in ideals, each regarding all the others as aliens, and themselves, in their hearts, as the chosen people. The answer to that riddle is undoubtedly that these centuries have been centuries of preaching without practice, of theory without demonstration. Very different were those early days when the master Metaphysician won the people by proving the power of Principle in their streets and houses, and when his disciples went out not only to preach the gospel but to heal the sick. In those days the boundaries of nations and the barriers of speech gave way to demonstration, as was shown on the day of Pentecost, when the devout strangers dwelling in Jerusalem heard the apostles speak, each in his own tongue—"Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea and in Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Lydia about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes, and Arabians,"—so that they were all amazed. Some day the miracle of Pentecost will have to be repeated on a larger scale and in another way, but this will never be until mankind has learned more fully how to think in hemispheres.

What was the miracle of this day of Pentecost? It was simply the understanding of Truth flooding the human consciousness and obliterating material limitations. But these limitations never can be obliterated so long as men think in terms of the parish or even of the nation. Mrs. Eddy, writing of the change which the resurrection wrought in the outlook of the disciples, says, on page 43 of Science and Health: "Heretofore they had only believed; now they understood. The advent of this understanding is what is meant by the descent of the Holy Ghost,—that influx of divine Science which so illuminated the Pentecostal Day and is now repeating its ancient history." On this day of Pentecost the disciples saw as they had never seen before. They were finding, as Mrs. Eddy points out, on page 269 of Science and Health, how a knowledge of "Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul." Only, that is to say, as the individual comes to grasp the fact that the world is a thought creation can he hope to understand that saying of Christ Jesus to the disciples, "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you." This is thinking in hemispheres, though, perhaps, in an unexpected way.