From the Editors February 21, 2011 Issue

What do we cling to?

The Editors

Nature gives visible expression to invisible truth, Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted in Nature, his 1836 book that laid the foundation for transcendentalism. Behind the curtain of material beauty lies spiritual reality, and therefore, as Emerson wrote, “‘every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul.’”

Later in the 19th century, Mary Baker Eddy went further. She discovered that seeing the spiritual reality behind surface appearances enabled Christ Jesus to heal—and can enable everyone today to heal on the same metaphysical basis.

“Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul,” Mrs. Eddy explained in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures  (p. 269). And when, as here, she used Soul as a synonym for God, she capitalized the word.