The Divine Viewpoint

Thoreau once said: “There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, not a grain more. The actual objects which one man will see from a hill-top are just as different from those which another will see as the beholders are different.” This fact which Thoreau discerned regarding the objects of nature, the Christian Scientist knows to be equally true regarding every human experience; for to the Christian Scientist it has been demonstrated that God, good, being omnipresent, all that is perfect, beautiful, satisfying, is always and everywhere present, and the viewpoint of the individual determines the amount of good which he discerns and enjoys.

It may be said that the mission of Christian Science is so to spiritualize one’s viewpoint that the presence of good may be apparent here and now; for this Science seeks not to change that which God hath created, but to unveil it. It is the operation of divine Love which spiritualizes thought and gives the true viewpoint. Divine Love enables us to understand the Father and His manifestations, even as human affection helps us to understand each other in daily living. We then come to find that the true viewpoint reveals to us, in the exact degree that we possess it, the present perfectness of being, and destroys the evil which to unenlightened thought may seem to be.

Divine Love is and always has been reflected through spiritual understanding by God’s man. Jesus was awake to it; indeed, it was the Christ he manifested. We might say it was Jesus’ correct viewpoint which enabled him to behold, spiritually, the perfect man, where material sense saw a sick person; and Mrs. Eddy tells us in our textbook, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” (p. 477), “This correct view of man healed the sick.”

The prophet Jeremiah brings out very clearly the difference between one whose viewpoint is spiritualized and another whose outlook is dimmed by materiality. He says of the latter, “He shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited.” Good is present; but because of the darkness of mortal mind he sees it not; for he is still a mental dweller in “the parched places in the wilderness,”—wilderness, that unhappy state characterized in the Glossary of Science and Health (p. 597) as “loneliness; doubt; darkness.”

How different is the experience of the one dwelling in the understanding of divine Love! He rejoices as he proceeds, in keeping with the prophet’s words, “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord. … For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.” The heat and drought of so-called mortal mind have no power to affect the experience of him whose vision is divine, spiritual.

Let those struggling with any of the claims which the carnal mind presents to the children of men,—be it poverty, sickness, sin, unhappiness, or discordant environment,—let them hear the glorious truth that nothing needs to be changed but their viewpoint! Let them so eliminate material sense that spiritual sense, “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” may shine through, and reveal the ever present good! Let us not forget that our every experience, however extraneous to us it may seem to be, is wholly within our own consciousness, reluctant though we may be to admit it. If, for instance, one who seems to be suffering from a discordant environment would accept the fact (already demonstrated in Christian Science to be true) that environment is not something outside of himself, but embraced in his own thinking, and would cease his complaining and criticism, and set about, with consecration and humility, to hold his thinking to the actual facts of being as taught in our textbook, the real, the perfect condition would be revealed to him; not a world of material men and women, condemning and being condemned, but God’s ideas in and of divine Mind, loving and being loved. Our Leader says (Science and Health, p. 295): “God creates and governs the universe, including man. The universe is filled with spiritual ideas, which He evolves, and they are obedient to the Mind that makes them.” This absolute truth, realized and faithfully adhered to by thought aglow with love, would inevitably bring about right environment, including the right sense of relationship, harmonious and happy. Thus are proved Jesus’ words, “If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”

As we journey on, faithful to our understanding of the divine viewpoint, day by day glimpsing a little more of the Christ in and about us, let us remember that this is the practical demonstration of drawing nigh unto Him, of knowing Him, the Father; for must we not know this Father, who is all good, by the very expression of that good,—the reflection of Life, Truth, and Love by His creation, man? Let us, therefore, watch for these manifestations in word, in deed, and in what Jesus called “signs.” Seeing them, let us recognize from whence they come, appreciate them, and give God thanks for them, rejoicing that we have “seen the Father.” If we fail to do this, as we sometimes do, and cry out like Philip of old in the very presence of the Christ, “Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us,” we may hear, as did he, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?”