Article December 15, 1951 Issue

ZION SPIRITUALLY SEEN

ALICE KINSMAN SMITH

Prominent among mankind's plaints is unhappiness over environment. Multitudes believe that if they could live or work in a better place or with better people, satisfaction and happiness would be the result. To these discontented individuals Christian Science brings a hopeful message, turning consciousness from dependence on the frail and deceptive promises of material sense to the true understanding of existence and environment with its spiritual joys.

After her discovery of Christian Science Mary Baker Eddy, schooled by years of deprivation and affliction, was able to assure mankind that "Soul has infinite resources with which to bless mankind, and happiness would be more readily attained and would be more secure in our keeping, if sought in Soul;" and she added: "Higher enjoyments alone can satisfy the cravings of immortal man. We cannot circumscribe happiness within the limits of personal sense. The senses confer no real enjoyment" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 60, 61). The personal senses may testify to discord or lack, frustration or boredom, or they may even report fleetingly a sense of well-being, happiness, satisfaction, or success.

But personal sense is never reliable, because it sees only the material and temporal, never the real and eternal. As personal sense is rejected and Soul-sense, or the discernment of spiritual reality, is cultivated, there unfolds a realization of the presence of abundant, ever-available good, the ingredients of a satisfying, harmonious experience. This Soul-sense is a recognition of God's presence and power, an acknowledgment that the Mind which governs man is never expressed through matter, never subject to human beliefs or limited by material circumstances. It is the Godlike consciousness, which confers a state of harmony, that mankind has endeavored through the ages to attain. Generally, however, it has been sought through or in some special form of materiality, rather than in the divine consciousness.

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ACKNOWLEDGING "THE INFINITE UNSEEN"