Some of you know of the bear in a city zoo who, though enclosed in an area where he had ample room to move about with considerable freedom, did not do so. Instead, visitors observed him taking a few steps forward and a few steps back, forward and back, hour after hour, indifferent to the freedom afforded him. When asked why the bear did this, his keeper replied: "He has the small cage habit. He became so accustomed, when young and confined in a small cage, to the limitations it imposed on him that he has remained mentally bound by them, even though he is now physically free to move about in a larger space." The range of his activity was determined not by the physical condition around him, but by the mental condition within him.

A woman once complained to the naturalist, John Burroughs, that she could find no birds in her garden. Quickly pointing to a score of birds in the trees and bushes about them, the naturalist observed, "Madam, you must have birds in your heart before you can find them in the bushes."

How slow we are to learn the simple truth that what we think of as being without us is only the mental concept of existence that is within us. Our without is our within. This truth Jesus patiently and persistently endeavored to drive home to his hearers. "The kingdom of God," he repeatedly told them, "is within you." But most of them declined to believe this, preferring to believe that it was matter's kingdom which was seen about them and thought within them. They believed their outlook was determined more by the forces of material education and environment than by the one intelligent, causative Mind, God.

Man, as the idea of Spirit, Mind, has only the status, consciousness, and sensibility that derive from oneness with God. This means that the kingdom of God is the only environment man actually perceives, knows, or is in. His identity, environment, relationships, and activity are determined not by persons, material circumstances, and events without him, but by the infinite Father Mind, active within him. This Mind forever makes him to be conscious of Love's kingdom and his God-determined place, activity, and unity with all men therein.

"The small cage habit," blindness to the birds in our heart and so in our mental garden, the restrictions and unhappiness of discordant material environment in which mortal persons seem to wield more influence than God—all these are negative, mistaken mental concepts. They are externalized modes of the false material mind, and nothing more. They are not the consciousness of man.

How can we be rid of them? Christian Science gives the answer. It is persistently to deny that there is a mortal mind to make a mortal man, and embody, environ, limit, and restrict him through material forces, circumstances, and persons, and to see that the reason for such denial is that the only cause is God, Spirit, Mind, good. Therefore there can be no effect—not one—except of His making. Every effect of God evidences the harmony, beauty, and freedom which inhere in Him, and necessarily characterize all His work. Man, as the individual expression of divine Mind, knows only the effect of God, sees only the effect of God. He is constantly conscious of the allness and oneness of God and of His kingdom, and of the joyous, free, intelligence-expressing ideas, identities, and environment which are therein.

"Earth's actors change earth's scenes," says Mary Baker Eddy in her Message to The Mother Church for 1902 (p. 17). And how do they do this? By changing their concept of creation, not by changing creation. They move out of their thought the earth scenes that come from a negative material mind by refusing longer to believe they are creatures and puppets of this mind and victims of its forces, and by aligning their sense of life and selfhood with immortal Mind, eternal Spirit, and becoming increasingly aware of the presence of this Mind and its intelligently unified universe and man's satisfying place therein. In the degree the spiritual fact displaces materiality's lie in your thought and mine, a more normal, harmonious, well-ordered sense of existence appears. But the change without begins with, depends on, and evidences the basic change within. A stereopticon or movie projector throws on the screen only the picture that is in it. So we see externalized on the screen of human experience only what we consent to accept as our sense of creation. The only way to change the picture without is to change the concept within.

Moffatt translates a statement of Paul to the Corinthians thus: "There is a new creation whenever a man comes to be in Christ; what is old is gone, the new has come" (II Cor. 5:17). We come to Christ in the measure we disassociate our sense of life and manhood from mortal mind, matter, and material sense, and unite our thought to God and the spiritual idea of existence, which reveals that what we may think of as our "without" and our "within" blend in the oneness of our true consciousness—the Mind of Christ.

Paul Stark Seeley