Article September 5, 1977 Issue

Nature: Its Superlative Original

BEATRICE M. JEWITT

Someone who has not been studying Christian Science very long said to me, "I can accept that the mortal self is unreal—a false concept of man—but I simply cannot bring myself to accept that the flowers I love have no reality." Another friend, although she has been studying Christian Science for many years, feels a similar reluctance about everything in nature and admits that she really doesn't want to see these things in any other than the physical-sense way, which, she says, is so inexpressibly beautiful.

We need not stop with the thought that beautiful things are unreal. We can immediately go on to understand the spiritual fact as the reality behind each bird or flower or tree. How naturally Christ Jesus drew lessons from nature! The spiritual fact hinted by what we see around us is the expression of God, and its beauty must be superlative—beyond anything the human mind could realize.

The true, spiritual idea of a flower or a bird or a tree—or of anything—is more satisfying than the material concept. Mrs. Eddy says, "Beauty, as well as truth, is eternal; but the beauty of material things passes away, fading and fleeting as mortal belief."^{Science and Health, p. 247;} So our love of material beauty must always be at least tinged with sadness. In most of nature there is an element of evil or inharmony; for example, according to human lore, a lovely flower can cause hay fever or be poisonous, many plants have thorns, and certainly animals and birds are often predatory.