Article November 8, 1913 Issue

Reflection versus Belief

CHARLES K. MILLER

The words "reflection" and "belief" are used so often by our Leader in her endeavor to elucidate the subject of Christian Science, the study of which is enabling its students to enjoy an ever-increasing understanding of God and man, that a consideration of these words may throw added light upon our path. Let us take the words of St. John, "Now are we the sons of God," and their correlative in Science and Health, "Man is His image and likeness" (p. 468), and we have statements of truth which conflict with the evidence accepted by the material senses. We have had such unbounded confidence in the seeing of the eye and the hearing of the ear that it is not always easy to comprehend how man can be perfect now, when it seems so evident that he is subject to sin, sickness, and death.

Now the reflection of any object on the surface of a body of water, being a material concept, does not express in a satisfying way the conditions of spiritual reflection, but it offers some helpful lessons which tend to turn thought into channels leading to a better understanding of the true reflection. Suppose we approach a lake on the opposite side of which is a high promontory, which we observe as we advance toward it. Arriving at the edge of the lake, we find a man peering absorbedly into the waters, which are somewhat disturbed by the intermittent breezes. He perhaps has approached the lake without observing the promontory, and has been so intent upon the changing appearance of the mountain, which seems to him to be under the water, that he has not looked up to see the object which is being reflected.

How much this is like the mortal state referred to by Mrs. Eddy in Science and Health (p. 91), where she says, "Absorbed in material selfhood we discern and reflect but faintly the substance of Life or Mind"! In his ignorance, or in his absorption in the testimony of the physical eye, the picture presented to him by mortal sense, one may accept the inverted mountain in the lake, undergoing changes of contour and color, as the actual object of vision. It may be said that no one could be thus deceived, that every one knows a reflection when he sees it, but if so, is it not because of what he knows, apart from what his eye sees?

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