Article February 22, 1941 Issue

"Taking the oversight"

FANNY DEGROOT HASTINGS

RECENTLY, addressing a large seen and a still larger unseen audience, one of our outstanding columnists made the following statement: "It is the common people who behave like Shakespeare's kings." And in a Message delivered to her Church in 1901, Mary Baker Eddy, Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, stated (p. 30), "And no emperor is obeyed like the man 'clouting his own cloak'—working alone with God, yea, like the clear, far-seeing vision, the calm courage, and the great heart of the unselfed Christian hero." Never before in the history of mankind have the so-called common people counted for so much, and therefore never before has individual responsibility been so urgent or so universal.

The following exhortation made by Peter in his first epistle was addressed at the time exclusively to the few elders of the church. To them he wrote in part, "Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly." Today, with a general leavening taking place, the exhortation may be taken to heart by all church members; the instruction to feed the flock of God, our sisters and brothers, our near and distant neighbors, comes to one and all alike.

But, some may ask, how can we in a fear-ridden and fettered world bring nourishment to His flock? Christian Scientists find the answer contained in that second phrase, "taking the oversight thereof." The dictionary defines the word "oversight" in part as "supervision." And that word in turn by subdivision becomes super vision, and thus begins to elucidate itself and the subject. More explicitly stated, we see that man's duty toward his fellow man is to attain and maintain a super vision of him, a vision of him that is above the human, that visually re-presents him in his original and immutable perfection as the child of God. Seeing him thus, "not by constraint, but willingly," we behold man, untouched by the horrors and depredations of war, the likeness of Spirit, clothed, fed, and forever in his right mind.

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