Article September 14, 1912 Issue

"THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS."

WILLIAM D. MCCRACKAN, M.A.

Holiness is only another form of the word wholeness. Among the sources of origin of the word holy, Webster's dictionary mentions an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "sound, safe, whole." When the psalmist therefore sang of "the beauty of holiness," he had in mind the exquisite completeness, symmetry, and order which always characterize true being. To be conscious of God's allness means to manifest a well-rounded existence, to exercise full capacities and talents, to be sound and safe. There are no impossibilities for good in God's kingdom. No lack or limitation can mar the infinite, and no fear of want disturbs him who dwells in "the secret place of the most High." Poverty of any sort, meaning thereby the sense of incompleteness as to any good thing, cannot hamper the activities of him who is under the law of God. He cannot feel unsound or unsafe.

Divine activity is the only real activity, since there is also but one real law, and that is the law of God. To express beauty, therefore, is to express the divine nature, and to do this is supremely natural, absolutely normal. The divine nature is spiritual and mental, and beauty must therefore be intrinsically spiritual and mental also. Matter and Spirit cannot coalesce, neither can their manifestations. One or the other must prevail. Indeed, one or the other must be real and the other unreal. The material man cannot be whole or complete. This false concept or counterfeit of man, described in the Scripture as having partaken of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, cannot be symmetrical and orderly. He represents the mistaken notion that good and evil can live together in peace and prosperity, can cooperate in normal existence. But Jesus said, "If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand." Mortal man is nothing but an inconsistent, self-contradictory, self-destructive concept, at war within itself, disorderly and incomplete, neither one thing nor the other, lacking in all the essentials of beauty or wholeness, unsound and unsafe.

Mrs. Eddy has set forth the true concept of beauty in the following words: "Beauty is a thing of life, which dwells forever in the eternal Mind and reflects the charms of His goodness in expression, form, outline, and color" (Science and Health, p. 247). By these words she raises the quest for beauty, which has always been a secret spring of action in human consciousness, from a material to a metaphysical basis. She also reveals as groundless the fears entertained by certain types of pious people in all ages, that beauty is inconsistent with sanctity. History has recorded many movements, both in ancient and modern times, designed to suppress beauty, on the assumption that it is a temptation to abandon spirituality, but a physical and therefore a false sense of beauty is one thing, while the beauty of holiness is another.

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