Editorial June 18, 1979 Issue

Healing by seeing through "the microscope of Spirit"

Naomi Price

The material universe is full of things we can't see materially—even with the help of a magnifying glass or microscope.

Mary Baker Eddy glimpsed this at an early age at school when her teacher asked the class, "If you were to take an orange, throw away the peel, squeeze out the juice, destroy the seeds and pulp, what would be left?" Some of the children said there would be nothing left. Others didn't know. But the young Mary Baker—as she was known before she was married—had a better answer. She said, "There would be left the thought of the orange."^{See Irving C. Tomlinson, Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966), p. 20;} Of course, that's true in a relative sense, and this understanding can point us to a deeper truth.

The thought of an orange, and of all other objects, is invisible to human sight. When we look at our friends, we see with our eyes their material bodies, their clothes, the expressions on their faces. But intuition tells us there's much more to people than that. There's more to them even than a human "thought"—their own or others' about them. In fact, their outward appearance and passing thoughts give a mere hint of their innate spiritual nature, made by God, which Paul refers to when he says, "The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made."^{Rom. 1:20;} There's the love they express, the joy, the intelligence, and all the other spiritual thoughts and qualities that constitute God's nature and that each one of His offspring reflects.