Article August 13, 1921 Issue

The Sea

SIR HENRY JAPP

In crossing the ocean it is impossible for one to escape the evidences of creative Mind. Especially is this so at night when, if the sky is clear and the sea smooth, it seems as if the ship were in the center of a large round black table under a huge inverted bowl of blue closing one in from above and fitting tightly around the table edge at the horizon. The only promise of something beyond those limits is the innumerable stars which appear to be formed by an all-pervading light shining form without through small holes pierced in the blue bowl. The finelly cut crescent of the new moon but enhances the illusion. When one realizes that from every point of the earth's surface a continuing vision of an endless number of stars can be seen, which may be multiplied many times as the limited human vision is enlarged by means of a telescope, and again multiplied if a camera is substituted for the eye at the telescope, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the true universe, of which this ordered host in the heavens is but our human sense, must be the effect of infinite creative Mind.

Since the infinite extends in all directions, one sees that infinite Mind must fill all space and must contain no element of destruction, so that in contemplating the nature of Mind one can but conclude that it must be good and contain no evil, for evil is self-destructive. It must be Love, for an infinite Mind containing hate must of necessity be self-destroyed. For the same reason it must be Truth and contain no error, it must be Life and contain no death, and it must be omnipotent, the only power, else if there were others powers one would ultimately conquer the others and be supreme, which God is. So, then, one reaches the divinely logical conclusion that since all space is filled with omnipotent Mind, good, Love, Truth, and Life, there can be in reality nothing unlike Mind, so that its opposite, matter, evil, sin, disease, and death have really no existence, and only seem to be real, as delusions, mirages, or false beliefs. Such conclusions although divinely logical seem to the human mind absurd, for this mind argues that the material universe and material man are the only realities, and that evil, sin, disease, and death are real experiences and no delusion. These conclusions are reached from the evidence before the senses, on the assumption that the senses are competent judges, but the inverted bowl of blue sky meeting the black table of the sea around the horizon, or the gray sky in the daytime meeting the green ocean, are the evidences of the senses which are refuted every mile the ship advances, for the sky is found to be as far from the sea when one arrives where the horizon seemed to be, as it was before.

There are innumerable instances with which every one is familiar where the senses are just as deceptive, and it requires only additional enlightenment to see that the senses are altogether liars, as Jesus said, and incapable of knowing Truth. In Christian Science we learn that this enlightenment is spiritual understanding and that the material senses are the material beliefs through which we have been looking at God's spiritual man and spiritual universe. We can escape the results of our false material viewpoint and become conscious of the joyous activity of infinite Mind, divine Principle, and of its perfect manifestation, man, by spiritualizing our thought through the study of the Bible along with the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, and by putting her teachings into practice in our daily lives and proving by demonstration that Christian Science heals the sick and sinning.

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