Likeness and Revelation

John B. Willis

How true it is that what we see and love, that we truly are; that like perceives and can be perceived only by like. This was glimpsed by the wise man who wrote, "Everything the individual sees without him corresponds to his state of mind, and everything in turn is intelligible to him as his onward thinking leads him into the truth." Yet more clearly was it seen by the poet when he declared,—

We acknowledge Christ,
A proof we comprehend his love, a proof
We have such love within ourselves,
Knew first what else we should not recognize.

These both rightly divined that our nature measures our capacity, the possibilities of revelation to us, and from this we gather the greatness of man, whose abilities must vastly exceed the compass of our present possible thought.

In the light of Christian Science, "like knows like" means essential at-one-ment between the word of Truth revealed and the heart of him who receives it. This fact appears in the words of the psalmist, "With the pure thou wilt show thyself pure," and yet more clearly in St. John's declaration, "We shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." This is the endowment of that pure and truly poetic sense which finds its quickening, its highest inspiration, in the spiritually ideal. The ability to perceive the manifestations of Truth and Love and to be made strong thereby,—that is, true and loving,—is our divinest possession, and it continually ministered to the insight and advance of the remarkable woman who discerned in the rose "the smile of God" (Science and Health, p. 175), and who gave us the scientific ground of all spiritual aptitude in defining man as the unsullied thought of infinite Mind.

In those wonderful lines which are read at the close of every Christian Science service, the sage of Patmos asserts the scientific fact regarding the true selfhood in the words, "Beloved, now are we the sons of God." He then goes on, in a paradoxical way, to name the contradictory phases of human experience. First there is the recognition of present submergence in that state in which "it doth not yet appear [to us] what we shall be;" in which the mists of mortal mentality exclude the full radiance of revelation, and consciousness is left in that semidarkness recognized by St. Paul when he declared that now we know only in part.

The day dawns, however, and men are awakening, so that though they count not themselves as yet "to have apprehended," they do begin to perceive, yes, "know," in so far as they are demonstrating the truths of being, that "when he shall appear," when all the mud of material belief shall have been cleared away, then we shall be indeed "like him." Recognition of the true selfhood, even in part, has brought recognition of its native possibilities. We enter into a new understanding of the Master's definition of life as Truth-knowing, and envisage the limitless bounty of that spiritual privilege in which it is ours to rejoice evermore. And how wonderful seems this thought of the true selfhood which has come to the world in Christian Science, when put over against that prevailing estimate of mortal sense which expresses itself in self-depreciation, the limpness and inefficiency which forever cries, "I pray thee have me excused."

That like knoweth like, and that this is explained in sameness of nature, is a truth of tremendous significance to the thoughtful. Every instinctive regard for virtue, every native recognition of the worth of honesty and integrity, every love for the beautiful, together with that aspiration for goodness and usefulness which is found in some measure in every man, and which at our best strongly asserts itself in consciousness,—all these impel us to paraphrase Tennyson and say, I am a part of all the good I have met. Likewise they make possible the realization of the truth expressed by Mrs. Eddy when she says in Science and Health (p. 90), "The admission to one's self that man is God's own likeness sets man free to master the infinite idea."

John B. Willis.

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