"The lens of Science"
What a happy, healthful, satisfying panorama comes into view when we look at human experience through the lens of spiritual perception! Instead of weakness and disease we behold the radiant strength and well-being of spiritual man as the reflection of omnipotent Spirit. Instead of poverty and want the reality of divine Love's all-satisfying affluence comes sharply into focus. In other words, we learn to look right through the mirage of material persons, objects, and circumstances and behold something of the normal harmony inherent in the universe of Spirit. Mary Baker Eddy says, "The lens of Science magnifies the divine power to human sight; and we then see the supremacy of Spirit and the nothingness of matter." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 194;
The mission of Christian Science is to reveal the truth of being. It is here to unfold to human consciousness the true nature of God and His universe, and the wonderful freedom and harmony this understanding brings to mankind. Through the study of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and the other writings of Mrs. Eddy, one may actually feel and know the reality of spiritual substance and apply this priceless perception in every practical way.
To "see" God means to perceive spiritually a reality unknown to material sense. No human eye can penetrate the mist of matter and behold divine reality. Yet multitudes of earnest students of Christian Science are demonstrating a sure knowledge of this unseen presence by healing the sick, the sinner, and the heavy of heart.
Christ Jesus consistently looked through "the lens of Science." This made him vividly aware of his heavenly Father and imparted a clear subjective sense of unity with divine Being. Through the utter purity of his thought, through his complete surrender of personal sense, he was enabled to perceive the divine Mind to be his very consciousness, life, substance, and action. To Jesus, God was a definite, knowable entity, and he proved this concept to be no mere mystical aberration by doing many wonderful works through his certain sense of oneness with creative Principle.
The great Master was never deceived by the threatening appearance of physical disease. Through "the lens of Science" he saw its lying pretensions to be a substanceless, powerless mirage, and instead beheld the man of God's creating, strong, healthy, and free. He instantly saw the real identity of Peter's mother-in-law and healed her of a fever. The record states that he "took her by the hand, and lifted her up; and immediately the fever left her, and she ministered unto them." Mark 1:31;
We too can heal the sick in proportion to our understanding of the illusive nature of matter and its seeming conditions. As we vigorously deny all reality to the aggressive suggestions of fear, pain, faulty action, prenatal influence, and the like, and then clearly perceive and joyously affirm the perfection of man in God, we shall see the trouble disappear into nameless nothingness. Mrs. Eddy clarifies this point beautifully when she writes, "And how is man, seen through the lens of Spirit, enlarged, and how counterpoised his origin from dust, and how he presses to his original, never severed from Spirit!" The First church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 129; And then farther on she continues, "The divine law gives to man health and life everlasting—gives a soul to Soul, a present harmony wherein the good man's heart takes hold on heaven, and whose feet can never be moved."
One brings the scientific relationship of God and man into sharp focus as he becomes humble enough to recognize the absolute allness of the one divine Mind, or Ego, and then to acknowledge this Ego, or I am , to be the divine Principle of every thought and act. The stubborn belief that man has a personal mind of his own, good or bad, brilliant or dull, blurs one's vision of spiritual reality and in belief separates him from his divine source. Mrs. Eddy writes, "Humility is lens and prism to the understanding of Mind-healing; it must be had to understand our textbook; it is indispensable to personal growth, and points out the chart of its divine Principle and rule of practice." Mis., p. 356;
As one progressively purifies human thought, as he silences egotism, sensuality, laziness, and hate, and in their place expresses the Godlike qualities of meekness, purity, vigor, and love, he will see—spiritually perceive—the primal unity of good, the oneness of his real identity with infinite Soul. Step by step, as one climbs to higher spiritual ground, he gains ever clearer glimpses of the indivisible wholeness and perfection of the real universe.
In his first Epistle to the Corinthian church Paul writes of this advancing unfoldment in these words, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." I Cor. 13:12.
Alan A. Aylwin
