Article October 2, 1948 Issue

WOULD YOU IMPROVE YOUR ENVIRONMENT?

JEANNE STEELY LAITNER

Would you experience more harmony, more beauty, more satisfaction in your daily living? Do you long for more of what is called fulfillment? Then ponder these significant words by Mary Baker Eddy in her "Miscellaneous Writings" (pp. 86, 87): "What mortals hear, see, feel, taste, smell, constitutes their present earth and heaven: but we must grow out of even this pleasing thraldom, and find wings to reach the glory of supersensible Life; then we shall soar above, as the bird in the clear ether of the blue temporal sky."

Since the evidence of the five material senses constitutes mortal environment, learning and demonstrating the truth to which man's spiritual senses testify release one from the bondage of matter and give one the joyous freedom of spiritual dominion. Christian Science reveals that the only real man is the image and likeness of God, and that this spiritual fact is proved in one's daily experience as one affirms and realizes the all-presence and all-power of God, good, and man's unity therewith. Claiming man's oneness with God includes acknowledging as one's own the faculties of Soul, and consequently discarding the evidence of the material senses. One student found the following analysis of each of the senses helpful and liberating.

Our Leader, Mrs. Eddy, says in "Rudimental Divine Science" (p. 5): "Soul is the only real consciousness which cognizes being. The body does not see, hear, smell, or taste. Human belief says that it does; but destroy this belief of seeing with the eye, and we could not see materially; and so it is with each of the physical senses." The material eye, then, is not the agent of man's vision. Rather, Soul, God, is the one source of all the illumination, all the cognizing, all the vision in the universe. Man, reflecting God, includes and expresses perfect vision. Let us then claim the ever-presence and perfection of true vision, which admits of no mortality, no structural defects, no passage of time, no hateful criticism or condemnation.

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WOULD YOU IMPROVE YOUR ENVIRONMENT?

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