Article May 30, 1925 Issue

Return to Thy Country

ALICE M. BRADLEY

My native land! What thrills of emotion, what flights of fancy, what tenderness are associated in the heart with these three words! But with the enlarged understanding which Christian Science gives of all things, these find a place on a higher plane than that on which a merely material sentiment found them. On page 128 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy we read: "A knowledge of the Science of being develops the latent abilities and possibilities of man. It extends the atmosphere of thought, giving mortals access to broader and higher realms. It raises the thinker into his native air of insight and perspicacity."

In the light of this teaching we see that the material thinker has wandered far from man's native land. At present the average citizen seems to be expressing the strange anomaly of clinging to that which he most detests. He desires peace, but pleads with pride, suspicion, and distrust for war. He yearns for permanent prosperity and security, but seems loath to part with hatred and revenge,—forces which are the actual cause of his discomfort, but which he is deluded into regarding as an integral ingredient of representative manhood.

The experiences which we crowd into human existence generally teach us their limitations. We find boundaries set to every material concept. A country described in physical terms is necessarily outlined, confined to its coast lines or border. When we have risen high enough into the right thinker's "native air of insight" to perceive that this boundary stands for limitation, as definitely in this instance as in all others, right at that point we shall lift our sense of national limitation into national spiritual individuality, seeing beyond the horizon of matter into the limitless realm of Spirit, where "boundless thought walks enraptured, and conception unconfined is winged to reach the divine glory" (Science and Health, p. 323). As Christian Scientists we pray daily, "Thy kingdom come." We must be watchful not to argue for its delay, instinctively striving for the kingdom of universal good, but mechanically holding on at the same time to beliefs that can never enter it.

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