Editorial September 20, 1947 Issue

KEEP THE VISION!

L. Ivimy Gwalter

Everything that ever has been accomplished for the human race has been done through vision. Great inventions, fabulous possibilities, freedoms won, the rights of man acknowledged and vindicated, all are the result of vision. So long as there is vision there is no defeat. The man or the nation with vision is the man or the nation with power. The vision of a statesman is essential to his greatness, as is the vision of a businessman to his success. The ancient seer wrote (Prov. 29:18), "Where there is no vision, the people perish." What in its true spiritual significance, then, is vision?

The words vision and idea are akin in that their respective Latin and Greek derivations signify to see. In Christian Science man is revealed as the idea of God. Mind evolves its own idea, and the idea exists and functions forever within Mind, as the expression of Mind. It is important to understand that Mind constitutes the idea; idea does not constitute Mind. Since God, or Mind, is the all-seeing and all-knowing, idea, or man, and vision can never be separated; thus man can never lose his vision, and the despairing cry of the mortal, "I have lost my vision," is silenced.

The Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, defines God thus (p. 587): "The great I AM; the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence." What a wonderful definition of God is this! Each one of the synonyms may be pondered separately and each of the adjectives applied to every synonym. For example, the all-knowing Mind is the all-knowing, all-loving Principle, hence is unfluctuating and invariable; the all-seeing Spirit is the all-acting Life; the all-wise Truth is the eternal Soul, and so on. God is the one and only Ego, "the great I AM;" and man, God's idea, has neither entity nor ego, neither individuality nor identity, separate from God.

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