A Proved Recipe

[Written Especially for Young People]

True beauty, like goodness and wisdom, is a divine attribute—infinite, spiritual, and for all. It is universal and eternal, and all may manifest it abundantly. We feel the need of beauty in our lives, and the greatest and only lasting beauty is what the Bible calls "the beauty of holiness," which shines to bless and comfort all who come within its radiance. "The recipe for beauty," writes Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 247, 248), "is to have less illusion and more Soul, to retreat from the belief of pain or pleasure in the body into the unchanging calm and glorious freedom of spiritual harmony."

The recipe says we should have "less illusion." We learn in Christian Science that it is an illusion to believe that we live in a corporeal body and are limited by it. No one could possibly lose anything real by having "less illusion," or, in other words, by ceasing to be deceived. When one turns from the deceptive belief that he lives in a human body, he has taken a step towards manifesting true beauty. God is Spirit. Man, God's likeness, is therefore spiritual. Mrs. Eddy says (ibid., p. 208), "You embrace your body in your thought, and you should delineate upon it thoughts of health, not of sickness." "you embrace your body in your thought"—surely no one ever heard of being inside that which he embraced!

The object you call your human body is not you, but yours to command. Does it give the impression that you wish? Does it represent your best thinking? Are you delineating on it healthy thoughts?

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Triumphant Peace
January 13, 1940
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