AS offspring of the infinite we are ever in God's presence, but we are conscious of this only as we entertain good and right thoughts. It is insufficient to bask emotionally in the glow of another's good thoughts, or to sit in the intellectual enthralment of the contemplation of great possibilities. We must embody good thoughts if we would possess them. We must feel them and live them to experience their power. Right thinking is more than valid syllogism, more than correct conclusion, deduced from empirical knowledge. Right thinking is a moral and spiritual attitude, inclusive of legitimate deduction; the sine qua non of conscious and untrammeled good, regnant in those who are quickening to things spiritual. Right thinking is a possibility to each and every individual, and implies attainment through individual experience, effort, and achievement over evil. To think effectively one must do his thinking in the irradiance of his highest concept of good. This alone confers upon him the power of discrimination, wherewith to reject or endorse the conclusions of others. He can think thus purely only as he is governed by God, divine Mind; only as he thinks things true, things lovely, things of good report.
The possession of such a thought standard is made possible to us as we apprehend divine Principle through Christian Science. It makes direct and final appeal not only to our religious but to our rational sense. We see instinctively, as we follow Mrs. Eddy's teachings, that Principle is spiritual; and we apprehend her discovery of what constitutes the truly spiritual, as opposed to the generally accepted meaning of this term. With advancing comprehension we behold in the spiritual the thought of God, bearing witness of Himself to human consciousness, in a perfectly simple way, through those quickening instincts which in spite of material contradiction attest the presence and sovereignty of good, and which testify to the constant capacity of a purified humanhood to recognize this great and redemptive fact.
Nominally one may long have accepted the postulates that God is Spirit and that God is all; but now we discern, with the dawn of understanding, that Spirit is "intelligent good" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 267). We are therefore prepared to hail the inspiring conclusion that everything, being of Spirit, must when viewed aright prove to be the expression of intelligent good. There enters thus into the mental grasp the essential concept of infinite Love as underlying cause, the Principle of all that is; and the universe acquires a new meaning. We have found a basis from which to think logically on the plane of good; a basis from which with admiration we 'behold arise the perfect structure of our hopes, the bulwark of a complete salvation, in which are welded indissolubly what were long considered opposites, science and revelation.
