Article June 22, 1957 Issue

WHY WEAR A DISGUISE?

ETHEL DANIELS HUBBARD

In the fairy tale, "Beauty and the Beast," Beauty dreamed of a splendid young prince who urged her to find him out, whatever his disguise. This encouraged Beauty to overlook the unlovely exterior of the Beast, and she grew to love him for the qualities of kindness and affection which he expressed. Then the Beast vanished, and the prince, who had been concealed by the beastlike disguise, appeared.

Every individual human being wears a disguise which conceals in varying degrees his true identity. This disguise is the material sense which he entertains of himself. The physical presence which we call man is not the man made by God and maintained in indissoluble unity with God. The tragic mistake of humanity has been acceptance of the mortal, material disguise as the reality of man. The Beast was just a beast to those who saw him, until Beauty perceived his real qualities, and the prince was revealed.

There come times in our experience when we sense, perhaps dimly and fleetingly, the incongruity of the material appraisal of man. We feel within ourselves a measureless capacity for thinking and feeling, an innate dignity, a surge of aspiration. This feeling is experienced in varying degrees in ordinary human living, in which there seems to be a disguise or mist that blurs our vision of reality. What can strip off the disguise and dissolve the mist?

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