Article March 21, 1925 Issue

A Lesson in Perspective

LILLIAN FRENCH READ

TO the Christian Scientist, taking his journey out of materiality into the promised land of spiritual reality and looking for tokens of divine guidance all along the way, many a seemingly trivial incident furnishes instruction and inspiration. The light of spiritual understanding, gained from the study of Christian Science, now illumines all things,—even the face of nature,—and, looking more and more with the "seeing eye," the Christian Scientist perceives many a beautiful hint of spiritual truth in the familiar environment of everyday life.

Thus to one student came a comforting lesson from a simple observation during a morning walk. Her path lay along a high ridge of land, and was bordered by a wire fence. However necessary this fence may have seemed to the farmer whose land it separated from the highway, to the Scientist it spoke of nothing but limitation and restriction. Meditating, as she walked, on certain claims of error which were seeming to hem her in and restrict her rightful activity in life, she saw nothing but ugliness in the wire fence upon which her eyes were fastened.

But of a sudden her gaze shifted, and no longer focused itself upon the twisted, rusty wire. Then, through and beyond the fence she saw a picture of pastoral beauty spread out before her,—orchards in bloom, the warm tints of furrowed fields, the tender green of early wheat, comfortable homesteads, and grazing herds, and far off on the horizon the blue waters of a lake sparkling in the sun. Filled and thrilled with the beauty of the scene though she was, the Scientist was even more deeply grateful for the spiritual lesson the simple experience contained for her. For in a flash she saw that by merely shifting her gaze she had been able to behold the beauty which lay right before her eyes, and perceived that just as surely in the mental realm a change of consciousness would reveal what Mrs. Eddy calls, in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 61), "verities priceless, eternal, and just at hand."

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