Article May 6, 1950 Issue

THE CORRECT VIEW IS LOVE

ELEANOR SHIPMAN MINER

In the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, tells us, on pages 476 and 477: "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick."

This correct view was truly synonymous with love, for what higher expression of Love could be possible than that which sees only as God sees—correctly? What more satisfying perception could there be than that God, divine Love, is man's Father-Mother, and that man is God's qualities individualized? This correct view enabled Jesus to choose rightly his immediate disciples, on whom the success of his mission so greatly depended. To human sense, Peter was impetuous and cowardly. He attempted to walk on the water before he had cast all doubt and fear out of his own thought (see Matt. 14), and he later denied the Master three times in an effort to ensure his own personal safety (see Luke 22). Thomas seemed to be blinded by materiality, and James and John desirous of personal position, for the latter two besought Jesus to reserve a high place for them in glory (see Mark 10). Yet in each case the correct view of man enabled Jesus to perceive beyond the humanly apparent and to behold the perfect man where mortal man seemed to mortal sense to be.

After the resurrection, a greater measure of the understanding of Love dawned on Peter's thought, enabling him to discard more and more of the beliefs of mortality and to see himself in truer and truer vision as the Master had beheld him: as the perceiver of the Christ, the Rock, or manifestation of the power of God, upon which the Church of divine Spirit is built. His enlarged view of God and man enabled him to follow his Master's example by healing the lame man at the gate of the temple (see Acts 3) and by doing many other wondrous works. The love which enabled Jesus to see beneath the material thinking of Thomas was rewarded when doubt was finally replaced with a deeper perception of the Master's representation of God, which inspired Thomas to exclaim (John 20:28), "My Lord and my God."

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