Article November 22, 1919 Issue

The Heart of Man

REGINALD H. SCHENCK

Throughout the ages the heart of man has been conceived of as the seat of all emotions, the origin of joy and sorrow, love and hatred, good and evil. The poet Wordsworth sang of "a heart, the fountain of sweet tears; and love and thought and joy," while the Scripture declares, "A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil." All of which Solomon in his wisdom succinctly expressed when he said of one who has "an evil eye," that "as he thinketh in his heart, so is he."

To a student of divine metaphysics, an evil heart can relate only to the sinning race of Adam. Now Adam is the false concept of man, and from this Adam-heart of false belief "proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies," but out of the heart of the real man proceed the things of the Father. Believing the Adam-man to be God's likeness, evil appears to come from the same source as good, and what is called man's heart would seem to measure out, beat by beat, from the cradle to the grave, his very life. To-day we are blessed through the light of Christian Science with the spiritual understanding of Mind as the source and primal cause, as Life, Truth, and Love, and may find the proof by demonstration that, as Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 207), "there is but one primal cause. Therefore there can be no effect from any other cause, and there can be no reality in aught which does not proceed from this great and only cause."

This great and only cause, divine Mind, is omniscient good; and spiritual man, God's image, exactly reflects all that Mind knows and sees. In his capacity to think, an individual is conscious of perfection in the degree that his thinking is in accordance with Principle or Mind. Thus it is the pure in heart who see good, God, and enjoy His blessings, while a double-minded man, believing evil to be as real as good, experiences his own false imaginings making a reality of the carnal or human mind, and the sin, sickness, and death which constitute materiality and mortality.

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