Article January 28, 1922 Issue

The Wings of a Great Eagle

JAMES C. THOMAS

THOUGHT is as infinite as Mind itself, and its characteristics are boundless. From its pure source, the divine intelligence, or God, it emanates as the likeness of infinity, for it is variety itself. Another way of expressing this likeness of infinity is of course to call it the image and likeness of Spirit, so that it is spiritual man. It follows that to man belongs a nature and characteristics so varied that it requires eternity to unfold them.

The significance of thought and its predominance in real life plainly permeates the Bible, where many of its qualities are delineated in figurative language that is of the utmost incisiveness in its appeal to the discernment of him who studies it. To grasp the metaphysical meaning of the figures used by the writers enhances spiritual understanding. Mary Baker Eddy in her chapter on Genesis in ''Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures'' has shown the deep scientific import of that chapter. Quoting the verses telling of the fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven, and of the great whales and again of the winged fowl she writes on page 511, ''The fowls, which fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven, correspond to aspirations soaring beyond and above corporeality to the understanding of the incorporeal and divine Principle, Love;'' and on page 514 she says, ''In the figurative transmission from the divine thought to the human, diligence, promptness, and perseverance are likened to 'the cattle upon a thousand hills.'"

Turning to unlimited, immeasurable consciousness or Mind for deliverance from mortal falsities, the individual may by pure understanding ascend above material sense. These falsities may be in the form of sin or sickness or of the vaster warring attempt of suppositional evil to engulf the world and its spiritual advancement in chaos. This ascending may be only as the feeble nestling flies, barely able to remain above the earth, or it may be as the great eagle, rising with mighty power out of sight of the earth and beyond the clouds themselves, thus symbolizing thought so ascendant that it may be designated as having the ''wings of a great eagle.'' So it is that when John the Revelator writes of the woman, or spiritual idea, protected forever from the would-be assaults of evil, he says, ''And to the woman fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent.''

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