The world, which uses all words with extraordinary slovenliness, does a greater despite to genius than to most of them. To hear the man in the street speak, it might be imagined that genius grows on every apple tree, whereas it grows only in the garden of the Hesperides. That, surely, is only what a certain great writer was endeavoring to get said in the well-known line, "Soul discontented with capacity." Landor's philosophy, however, knew little enough of soul, except from a purely sensuous human standpoint. If he had understood that Soul was, in reality, a synonym for Spirit, and so for God or Principle, he would have known that capacity could be nothing except the reflection of Soul or Principle, and that as this capacity broadens into a fuller reflection of Principle, it becomes just all there is of genius. That is what Mrs. Eddy means in writing, on page 313 of Science and Health: "Jesus of Nazareth was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe. He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause." The genius of Jesus, in other words, lay in his perception of spiritual realities: the genius of a Plato or a Shakespeare exists in an almost innate realization of the fact that, in spite of the evidence of their physical senses, there is something to be learned outside the realm of matter.

The genius of Christ Jesus, then, was a purely spiritual faculty which enabled him, in teaching, to personify the belief of life in matter as a liar, and so to dismiss human fatherhood, to the Jews, in the phrase, "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." Jesus, in other words, was the first man to perceive the utter unreality of matter. This enabled him to give the overwhelming demonstrations of its unreality manifested in walking on the waters, feeding the multitude, and overcoming death. Plato showed his genius, while living a sensuous life, in struggling to evolve a theory of mental causation based on the human mind; Shakespeare, in a poetry, instinct with an unconscious Platonism, which could express itself in lines like.

True capacity, then, is the capacity of Soul, the appreciation of the unseen things of Spirit. Material capacity is displayed in the exercise of the human intellect, divorced from any realization of the fact that, as a great scholar translates Paul's wonderful saying to the church in Corinth, "The things we see now are reflections from a mirror which we have to make out as best we can, but then we shall see realities face to face." As, that is to say, the individual gains even a slight understanding of spiritual things, he realizes that material phenomena are not by any means just what they appear to the human senses, and thus, as his human capacity is supplanted by spiritual capacity, he begins more and more to comprehend the reality of being, to see, as Paul puts it, face to face. How this process develops, Mrs. Eddy has made clear on page 128 of Science and Health: "The term Science, properly understood, refers only to the laws of God and to His government of the universe, inclusive of man. From this it follows that business men and cultured scholars have found that Christian Science enhances their endurance and mental powers, enlarges their perception of character, gives them acuteness and comprehensiveness and an ability to exceed their ordinary capacity." Thus the genius of Christian Science manifests itself in demonstration rather than theory, in works rather than in words.

A man's true capacity, then, is summed up in his ability to understand spiritual things; and, obviously, the greater this understanding grows, the more fully he becomes able to demonstrate the genius of Christian Science in healing the sick and repeating the other mighty works performed by Christ Jesus. Consequently, the only way in which to increase his spiritual capacity is for the individual to strive for the Mind that was in Christ Jesus. He must set to work to destroy all that is unlike Principle in human consciousness, and only in the degree in which he is successful in this for himself can he hope to be of any assistance to his neighbors. He must take up arms against every form of mental sensuality, since only as the carnal mind gives place to the Mind of Christ can he hope to see realities face to face, and until he begins to accomplish that end, it must be impossible for him to see the perfect man instead of his sick and sinful counterfeit, and so to heal the sick and the sinner as Christ Jesus healed them. "In healing the sick and sinning," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 141 of Science and Health, "Jesus elaborated the fact that the healing effect followed the understanding of the divine Principle and of the Christ-spirit which governed the corporeal Jesus. For this Principle there is no dynasty, no ecclesiastical monopoly. Its only crowned head is immortal sovereignty. Its only priest is the spiritualized man. The Bible declares that all believers are made 'kings and priests unto God.'"

The ability to heal scientifically is, then, the test of a man's spirituality, and this spirituality exists in the ratio of his capacity to understand Principle, and to live in obedience to it. As a man's spiritual capacity increases, however, so must his capacity to transact his daily affairs. He will become a better statesman, a better lawyer, a better business man, a better writer. Mrs. Eddy states this quite plainly not only in the passage already quoted, but on page 166 of "Miscellaneous Writings": "This spiritual idea, or Christ, entered into the minutiæ of the life of the personal Jesus. It made him an honest man, a good carpenter, and a good man, before it could make him the glorified." There are people in the world still mesmerized with the old theological belief that a man's capacity for the affairs of the world should decay in proportion to his spiritual growth. But, as long as it is a man's business to give advice as a lawyer, to guide the affairs of state, to preach sermons, or to make boxes, his work should be better and more intellectually done, because he has realized that his intellectual and mechanical capacity is subject not to any supposititious material law, but is the reflection of infinite Mind. A bad carpenter could scarcely have been a good healer, and it is to be suspected that Paul made as good tents as he wrote good philosophy.

In a world evolved by spiritual causation, it is obvious that capacity, like everything else, must be spiritual. But a supposititious world of counterfeit, sensuous impressions can exist only by reason of the fact that there is a real spiritual world to be counterfeited, and because the counterfeit owes its supposititious existence to the reality. Therefore was it that the writer of the book of Job made the Lord answer out of the whirlwind: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

Frederick Dixon.