Article May 29, 1948 Issue

LOOK OUT FROM THE STARS!

THEODORE WALLACH

In one of the most engaging and thought-provoking passages in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." Mary Baker Eddy makes this arresting assertion (p. 125); "The astronomer will no longer look up to the stars,—he will look out from them upon the universe." In the paragraph immediately preceding she sets forth with bold pen strokes the great fact that as human thought advances Spiritward man, God's reflection, will be seen to be governed not by material sense, but by Soul.

"Behold the height of the stars, how high they are!" (Job 22: 12.) The human mind is stirred by contemplation of the heavenly hosts. For centuries, fired by the beauty and sublime harmony of the stellar universe, men have appropriated it metaphorically. From a careful study of the above-mentioned passage it was evident to the writer that in these pages Mrs. Eddy expounds the allness of Spirit and the absolute nothingness of matter. He saw that the stars might be thought of as typifying high and holy thoughts, and that Mrs. Eddy's statement about no longer looking up to the stars but looking out from them upon the universe could be considered as a demand that we acknowledge the universe as spiritual, not material. He interpreted this demand to mean: No longer look up longingly to glorious ideals above your grasp—look out now from such heights upon the universe. Reason from the basis of spiritual perfection, waiting no longer to utilize your God-given ability.

The human mind usually rebels at such a mental attitude and altitude, calling it visionary, fanciful, delusive. But it is none of these, for Christian Science, which reveals the perfection of God's law and the immediacy of its application to human problems, is genuinely practical idealism. It is not "too good to be true;" rather is it the kind of idealism which encourages men to rely less and less upon the false material sense of things and more and more upon the spiritual sense, which leads out of mental darkness—depression, fear, sin, disease, and all kinds of limitations and sorrows.

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