Article January 2, 1926 Issue

"The beauty of holiness"

CORNELIA ERWIN BAILEY

Through the better understanding of the Bible which Christian Science has given its students, many words which before seemed obscure in cursory reading, now stand out much more clearly. The word "holy" is one of these. This word is derived from the old Anglo-Saxon word meaning whole; and we find many places in the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, where these words are used together or interchangeably. Webster defines "holy" as "spiritually whole or sound; of unimpaired innocence and virtue."

Human thought is very energetic in the acceptance or rejection of its own concepts of beauty or ugliness; and its guide in these matters is largely material sense testimony, which personalizes these qualities, calling one as real as the other. Because it judges from a material basis, it necessarily fails to discern between the false and the true. Christian Science has come to correct human thinking, and will remedy its errors by giving thought a spiritual instead of a material basis. It is teaching mortals that they "must look beyond fading, finite forms, if they would gain the true sense of things" (Science and Health, p. 264). Beyond the material there is the real and beautiful and permanent, that which mankind may know and have here and now, that which it may experience and express, that which will begin to unfold for it the reality of all being, and make it to know what the Psalmist meant when he said, "Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined." The one who will look into this "beyond" will find that eternal wholeness or holiness which is man's portion and inheritance forever.

In human experience the transient things of earth claim to have a certain beauty, in spite of seeming woes and trials and much that is unlovely; and this being so, how much more beautiful should be to us those true ideas in which exists no destructive element. We cannot conceive of the Mind which is divine as being less than "spiritually whole or sound; of unimpaired innocence and virtue." All that emanates from divine Mind must be like itself; and in Mind there exists no provision for anything less perfect than itself.

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