Article April 1, 1916 Issue

Focusing the Light

JULIA S. KINNEY

While visiting the Grand Canon of Arizona and looking over its precipitous walls, in company with some friends, one of them, who was looking through a telescope, said to the writer: "See those things that look like white specks. They are tents, and there are people on horseback near the tents, which are on a little plateau, and below the plateau there is the river." All this seemed very surprising to the writer, since nothing of the sort was apparent to the naked eye; but when she looked through the telescope, sure enough, there was everything just as had been described. Where before nothing had been visible but a blur, now, by means of the powerful lens of the telescope, dashing waters, rocky ledge, and exuberant vegetation were brought to view in the depths of that immense chasm.

In a somewhat similar manner the writer remembers that before she knew anything about the teachings of Christian Science, friends told her that it had made the Bible clear to them and had made the omnipresence of God a demonstrable fact. She well remembers how strange this seemed to her, since her own understanding of the Bible was very dim and her conception of God vague and unsatisfactory. But after studying "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," the text-book of Christian Science, she found, even as her friends had told her, that the teachings of the Bible were all made clear. Like other Christian Scientists, she learned that, as we are told in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 194), "the lens of Science magnifies the divine power to human sight; and we then see the supremacy of Spirit and the nothingness of matter." This "lens of Science" has been available to all mankind in all ages, and the Bible is a record of the visions that Abraham, Jacob, Moses and the other prophets, Jesus and his disciples, gained as a result of its use. In the Scriptures the inspired writers have recorded the result of their experience, and named those things which clarified their view and those which seemed to dim it. Truly saith the wise man, "Where there is no vision, the people perish."

The author of Science and Health recorded her spiritual insight into the realities of being, and in proportion as her spiritual interpretations of the Scripture are understood and applied in every-day life, they bring health and harmony. The Church of Christ, Scientist, its services and its literature, all present opportunities for the student to broaden his own vision and aid in broadening that of others. In order to keep his vision clear, however, the Christian Scientist must constantly use the "lens of Science." In time of need he naturally turns to Science for relief, but when no acute distress occasions such action, he may be tempted to lay it aside. Recognizing this danger, Jesus said to his disciples: "If ... thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!"

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