Article December 30, 1911 Issue

DIVINE REALITY

SUE H. MIMS.

The highest philosophic thought has for many centuries grasped the sense that there is and must be an invisible reality opposed to the phenomenal and transient view of things. Kant teaches the difference between "empirical reality, or appearance of facts in our experience, and absolute reality, which belongs to the thing itself;" while Bronson Alcott writes that "the idealist is the true realist, grasping the substance and not the shadow; the man of sense is the visionary or illusionist, grasping things as permanencies and thoughts as fleeting phantoms." In the light of this statement, surely we cannot be surprised that our beloved Leader, Mrs. Eddy, should say of Alcott: "His athletic mind, scholarly and serene, was the first to bedew my hope with a drop of humanity" (Pulpit and Press, p. 5).

St. Paul defines this difference from the Christian point of view, when he admonishes us to "look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." The power, the wonderful power which accompanies the spiritual understanding of this philosophic and Christian truth, is today through the teaching of Christian Science being demonstrated to the world, and is the spiritual leaven that will "overturn, overturn, overturn, ... until he come whose right it is." Mrs. Eddy writes: "Reality is spiritual, harmonious, immutable, immortal, divine, eternal. Nothing unspiritual can be real, harmonious, or eternal" (Science and Health, p. 335). In the New Testament we find this luminous verse in the fifth chapter of I John: "And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true [real], and we are in him that is true [real], in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true [real] God, and eternal life."

Just as electricity, radium, and perhaps other so-called forces have slumbered in the recesses of the unperceived or unknown, and are now being utilized for humanity's convenience, so for centuries the dynamics of this great spiritual truth of being, the divine reality of immortal Mind and its perfect, harmonious manifestation in spiritual man and the universe, is again brought to light through Mrs. Eddy's clarified vision of Christ Jesus and his mission. Jesus distinctly said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,"—free from the illusion of the untrue or unreal; and with equal clearness Paul taught that the contemplation of the unseen, the "beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord," the divine ideal, will change us "from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."

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