Nathaniel Hawthorne in "The Great Stone Face" tells the legend of the profile on the mountainside, which was like a great and good man who would some day come to benefit the struggling villagers near by. A lowly lad spent many hours of his youth gazing at the profile and thinking of the goodness of the man who was to come. When he grew to manhood, his resemblance to the great stone face and his goodness of character led the villagers to recognize in him the one for whom they had waited. In the twenty-third chapter of the book of Proverbs it is written, "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he," a passage several times quoted by Mary Baker Eddy in her writings.
The possibilities involved in a change of character through thinking raises the question, "May not evil thoughts come to one as readily as the good?" Here Christian Science takes the field and by its teachings presents through invariable rule the art of spiritual thinking or knowing. It not only tells us that we must know the truth, but draws in unmistakable figure, and with boldness of outline, the ideas and thoughts of God that we are to know, shows how we may know them, and what is to be the result of this knowing in human experience. It lifts us from the arena of ethical speculation over both good and evil to the realm of invariable Mind, embracing the universe and man with its infinite power.
The study of God in Christian Science reveals God as Mind. Mind is All and includes all. What God or Mind knows, is all there is. What He comprehends, is all that really exists. What God knows about anything is all there is of it. What He does not know, is untrue and nonexistent. Thus Mrs. Eddy writes concerning God (Unity of Good, pp. 3, 20), "If He is All, He can have no consciousness of anything unlike Himself;" and, "He can see nothing outside of His own focal distance."
