ACCORDING to their uniform testimony, those who enter a. upon an honest, truth-seeking study of Christian Science invariably realize a great purification and exaltation of sense. Such a result is seen to be both natural and inevitable when one comes to know how this teaching links thought to God as ever near, and enriches one's concept not only of the truth and goodness, but of the beauty of His nature.
As directed in Christian Science, thought of God becomes thought of Truth and Love made manifest; of Principle expressed in its idea. The Christ is now revealed as the radiation of the one eternal source of light, and as never before beauty is seen to be related to being. It speaks ever for the harmonious unfoldment of the true and the good; it is to life what harmony is to music. Beneficent intelligence in all its infinite appearings gives rise to the true sense of law as the order of the divine activity. Apart from this activity, that is, apart from Life, truth and love would be abstract, undefined, and beauty, which is their blossoming, thus waits ever upon and is wedded to true living.
Christ Jesus referred to the lily of the field as announcing the presence of a wonder-worker, an infinite artist, and all his teaching is in proof that he identified the beautiful with the spiritual and not the material; that it belongs to substance and not to shadow; that it is at-one with the true and the good and like them fadeless and eternal. It becomes apparent, therefore, that the life of man must be ideally beautiful, since it is a concrete manifestation of the harmonies of divine law. In the light of this understanding the psalmist's phrase "the beauty of the Lord" takes on a new significance, and the fact that Christ Jesus was essentially a poet is fully explained. His words and deeds disclosed the divine nature, the order of the divine manifestation. In its totality, "his perfect life in perfect labor writ," to use Lanier's happy phrasing, reflected the divine completeness, and it has been adjudged by all mankind the one uniquely beautiful fact of history. In the broader significance of the term, his parables are poems. Over and above their picturings and their emphasis of a moral lesson, his stories about the prodigal, the sower, the good shepherd, the lost piece of money, etc., all express that which cannot be translated into words, that which directly appeals to the emotions and awakens a sense of joy. They thus meet the essential tests to which all art is subjected.
