An artist desired to make a copy of an exceedingly rare vase, but for some reason his copy bore but slight resemblance to the original. He exhibited his reproduction to a class of pupils, who copied it faithfully, fully believing that they had true copies of the original. We suffer a kindred disability in our effort to apprehend man. All our ideas and concepts of him have been gathered from a false source, from evidence obtained from the material senses, from an imperfect model, a concept that has but little resemblance to the real man. As we read the Scriptures in the light of Christian Science, and gain the understanding that the spiritual is the real and true, that the "carnal mind" cannot know anything of God, that the material senses cannot give reliable evidence of spiritual reality, we begin to see that we have been copying from a wrong model. Our beloved Leader says (Science and Health, p. 264), "Mortals must look beyond fading, finite forms, if they would gain the true sense of things." On the same page she says, "The crude creations of mortal thought must finally give place to the glorious forms which we sometimes behold in the camera of divine Mind, when the mental picture is spiritual and eternal." This may remind us of Paul's words, "We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal."
