Editorial October 25, 1913 Issue

"One is your Master"

John B. Willis

To hear a great artist is always to experience a great delight, and gain an added sense of that human capacity which, as Christian Science makes clear, is grounded in the divine. Technical proficiency always speaks for patient and prolonged effort, and sometimes for devotion to an ideal which is very much more than mere proficiency. We know that, whatever his faults, an artist can but abound in excellences; he has won, and he is surely worthy in many ways, and for the long-continued application by which alone he has gathered and now gives out the treasures of tone, one often feels a keen and lasting sense of indebtedness. Moreover, as one recalls the thrill and uplift of some great artistic event, his thought of mastery takes on a deeper, richer meaning. It is such a splendid thing to have held on until every difficulty is overcome, every delicacy and refinement of expression attained, and the performance is made to appear so easy and unlabored as to seem just the simple and natural thing which in truth it is.

But to interpret the ideal is to disclose not only the achievements and possibilities of the interpreter, but to reveal something more of the inexhaustible content of that which is interpreted or expressed, the greatness of the source of all beauty and all good. It is to make us understand as not before, perchance, that Jesus' phrase, "One is your Master," was a tribute to his Father, to whom the praise belonged, rather than to himself; that his greatness and all true greatness is the greatness of God, of the Principle whose nature and law, ideality and power, it is ours in Christ to reflect.

Further, great mastery brings to our thought not only the greatness of Mind, but the unity, the oneness in kind of capacity and its source, the gift and the Giver. Only the likeness of truth and goodness and beauty can apprehend and respond to the appeal of truth and goodness and beauty, the divine to the divine alone. St. Paul's phrase, "Christ in you, the hope of glory," thus becomes luminous. Assurance of the salvation of the human is grounded in this fundamental teaching of Christian Science,—that God is expressed in man, and that as human sense is freed from falsity we are conscious that Truth answers to truth in us, and this is the secret of demonstration.

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