Article October 30, 1937 Issue

The Wider View

ELSIE THEODORA DURANT

We read in the Scriptures of how the Israelites, when journeying to the "promised land," retarded their progress through limiting "the Holy One of Israel." The world today seems in danger of repeating history because of its lack of spiritual discernment, its ignorance of the limitless power of God and His infinite love for His children.

In her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy points to this danger in the following passage (p. 255): "Mortal man has made a covenant with his eyes to belittle Deity with human conceptions. In league with material sense, mortals take limited views of all things." But on the next page she also shows us how to take the progressive and practical steps towards the higher concept of God and man and attain the broader vision of creation which she herself so successfully gained and maintained through her discovery of Christian Science. She writes (ibid., p. 256): "Advancing to a higher place of action, thought rises from the material sense to the spiritual, from the scholastic to the inspirational, and from the mortal to the immortal. All things are created spiritually. Mind, not matter, is the creator." In order to gain the full import of these statements it is highly necessary that we watch our mental steps and make sure that we are not content to remain more or less stationary in any of the three stages of spiritual development given above. Our need is to progress beyond the material, scholastic, and mortal to the true sense of man as coexistent with God and eternally at the standpoint of perfection. Spiritual man does not pass from a lower state of development to a higher, being ever one with infinite, unfolding perfection. Neither, in reality, does mortal man. But through the revelation of Christian Science the thought or concept of the mortal is changed until it is completely dropped for the purely spiritual concept of man as idea, the image of the Father-Mother, God.

Mankind is attempting in many directions to combat evil in its various phases, including that of war. But because these attempts are mainly directed towards overcoming them through material means and methods, the results are often disappointing and lead to a sense of discouragement and failure, whereas if these human methods and ideals were lifted to the high level of spiritual understanding, inspiration, and vision, success would assuredly crown them. For by this higher means the ever-present perfection of God's universe and man in His image and likeness would dawn upon human thought, and the steady effect of this wider view upon the ills of the world would be manifested.

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