“Winged to reach the divine glory”

With the coming into view of improved conditions of travel and communication, through the medium of invention, mortals wonder often enough and naturally enough what the next steps will be when humanity has outgrown the present rate of speed of carrying individuals by aeroplane and carrying their voices by the swiftness of wireless telephony, as well as other modern marvels. But humanity must come to the point of abandoning its wondering and look forward to, and be satisfied with, nothing less than that which is perfection in all things and in all directions, Mind and the idea of Mind.

Divine Mind never ceases to unfold the glories, beauties, and spiritual excellence of the scientific universe. The process of creating which seems to take place in human invention is purely a false representation of what is actually taking place perpetually in Mind. That is, divine intelligence, without a single limit, is unfolding its infinite expression. Mind is bringing forth the pure image of all the vast knowledge and understanding which dwells in the unlimited consciousness, infinite good, or Spirit. This pure image is the spiritual creation, the unfoldment of which is the reality of invention, of which the mortal sense of invention is indeed a poor make-believe. Mary Baker Eddy, Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, deals with this subject in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” wherein she says on page 263 : “There can be but one creator, who has created all. Whatever seems to be a new creation, is but the discovery of some distant idea of Truth; else it is a new multiplication or self-division of mortal thought, as when some finite sense peers from its cloister with amazement and attempts to pattern the infinite.”

While in absolute truth mortals must look forward to what is even now the one fact and presence, the divinely creative Mind and the infinite idea expressing it, they nevertheless can be grateful for the higher sense of passing from place to place manifest in such inventions as the aeroplane and the wireless telephone. Traveling through so-called space at two hundred miles an hour with ease and safety is very obviously a betterment over the thirty miles per hour of Stephenson's Rocket, or even the mile-a-minute speed of express trains a few years ago. The aeroplane, certainly, is one step out of material limitation, but it affords only a hint of the true universe of Mind, wherein matter is not and spiritual activity is the entirety of unfoldment.

Mind, divine intelligence, knows not any passing from place to place in the sense of there being a “here” and a “there” with a distance in between those two points. Difficult as it is for mortals to grasp it, the fact must be comprehended sooner or later that Mind is omnipresence, for Mind is All. Therefore, ever presence is all the here, there, and everywhere there is. The perception of this tremendous fact is possible of attainment by men through uplifted understanding, as the result of constant striving for this understanding and its accompaniment, the happy advancement out of materialism. But this perception, this understanding, and this advancement must be the goal of mankind, and it is the demand of Principle, the unfolding spiritual consciousness, active in the world to-day, that progress be made toward this goal. As Mrs. Eddy says: “Beholding the infinite tasks of truth, we pause,—wait on God. Then we push onward, until boundless thought walks enraptured, and conception unconfined is winged to reach the divine glory” (Science and Health, p. 323 ).

The record of discovery and invention through the ages has been a history of the overcoming of fear. The sailors in the little ships of Columbus possessed such a dread of what they thought of as unknown that they shrank from sailing westward into it. And this conquest of fear is similar to that of the trapeze performer at a lofty point in a hippodrome, accomplishing unheard-of feats. So in greater degree is it with the aviators. Writing on page 199 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy says: “The feats of the gymnast prove that latent mental fears are subdued by him. The devotion of thought to an honest achievement makes the achievement possible. Exceptions only confirm this rule, proving that failure is occasioned by a too feeble faith.”

These “latent mental fears” are seldom, perhaps, in the discoverer himself, but in those around him, in the world looking on, and it is not necessarily expressed openly, but may be simply the sum total of the dread of humanity for what it conceives of as the unknown, or impossible. And yet the universe of Mind, including all the vast activity of divine intelligence, the unfoldment of Principle, is not unknown nor impossible but is ever present. The myriad forms of the one unlimited expression of Soul, which is the basis of true action, are here always for the spiritually discerning individual to know and to realize as the only real existence.

But while the inventions of past and present are in fact only suppositional imitations of the genuine creation, they are not to be scoffed at. In gaining the understanding of Mind, it is inevitable that in human affairs matter should have less and less weight in the world’s daily life, and it is not to be denied that a telephone without poles and wires between stations, and an aerial express free from tracks and a prescribed roadbed are a higher manifestation of communication than has been in use before their advent. But these inventions are merely proofs in human affairs of the destruction of limitation, and the drawing nearer to spiritual reality, which is and always has been the only fact, untouched by supposed belief in matter.

Mortals must turn away from a worshiping contemplation of material inventions as though they were the real, otherwise they will not have their lamps “trimmed and burning” with the light of spiritual understanding when the belief of limited existence fades more and more into nothingness. They must not permit themselves seemingly to be awed and mesmerized by the statement that the starry universe is so vast that it requires thirty-six thousand years for the light from a certain star cluster to reach the so-called earth, the speed of the light being one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. To human sense this is admittedly overwhelming, but it is a mere type of the infinity of Mind, which has no beginning and no ending, but is throughout all eternity and everywhere unfolding the unsearchableness of itself in its reflection, the spiritual, unlimited idea.