Editorial November 23, 1946 Issue

Appreciation and Appropriation

Margaret Morrison

An understanding heart is an appreciative heart. And what like appreciation so enlightens, enriches, and ennobles life? Appreciation of the good, the true, and the beautiful tints one's living with goodness, truth, and beauty, the beauty, truth, and goodness, the love and power, of God. His radiant, reality is infinite, encompassing all true being, maintaining beauty and harmony throughout creation. Yet how little it has been or is being appreciated. With sensibilities deadened by materialism the heart of humanity is blind to the presence and power of Spirit and has little appreciation of its government and glory. Surely the one God, who is Mind, has girded us round about with loveliness and goodness though we have not known Him.

On page 300 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy writes: "Human logic is awry when it attempts to draw correct spiritual conclusions regarding life from matter. Finite sense has no true appreciation of infinite Principle, God, or His infinite image or reflection, man." In order then to have a true appreciation of that which is real, worthy of appreciation, thought must be turned from the material sense of life to the spiritual, from the finite to the infinite, from person to Principle.

The question is often asked, How can one distinguish between that which is material and that which is spiritual? One way is to determine whether the thoughts that come to us for acceptance proceed from personal sense or from Principle, from the finite or the infinite. All true ideas, all those qualities, that which we should understand, appreciate, and appropriate, partake of the nature of Principle and are infinite in being. Good that is of God is infinite, shared equally by all. Good that is measured by personal sense, "my good," "our good," "their good," bounded by personal possession, is not of Spirit. Good that is not universal, infinite, is not wholly good.

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