Editorial May 17, 1919 Issue

Thinking

William P. McKenzie

Almost everybody finds a sense of arousement upon reading on the first page of the Preface to "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" the author's statement that "the time for thinkers has come." Consequently it is of importance to find out what a thinker is.

Is a wolf, stealthy, slinking, ominous, prowling about a fold, a thinker? Here is cruelty, lust, cunning, malign patience, ferocity; but it is only animalism. Is the shepherd's dog a thinker? Here is strength and fighting force like that of the wolf, and fangs to wound; but there is also courage and fidelity, something of love, not for the sheep, but for the master, and willingness to die for his sake. And the shepherd, is he a thinker? Not if he be only a hireling shepherd who flees before animalism, leaving the sheep unprotected. Jesus indicated that the good shepherd was one who stood ready to give his life for the sheep, and we may say that the true thinker is just that. He is one who is laying down his merely human sense of life; that is, he is divorcing animalism, fear, self-will, love of ease, sin, and sickness from consciousness so as to be able to think God's thoughts after Him, and to enlighten others with the light whereby he himself has been enabled to know and to see.

Such thinking must, of course, have a basis, and we find the basis very clearly indicated by Mrs. Eddy when she says (Science and Health, p. 467), "Reasoning from cause to effect in the Science of Mind, we begin with Mind, which must be understood through the idea which expresses it and cannot be learned from its opposite, matter." Thinking, then, is spiritual understanding, and its processes rest upon true causation. They "begin with Mind." If true thinking is understanding expressed in word or act, the reverse of this, that is, misunderstanding made active as mesmerism, is only what we might call cerebration. One might ask, for example, if some ordinary utterances of the press evidence thought. Too often there is no causative thinking at all behind the record, which is prepared only for the phonographing of baseless rumor. Shakespeare has put it thus:—

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