WHILE sailing down a seacoast harbor one beautiful day in summer, several ships at anchor were passed, and farther down the bay a dismantled craft was seen cast upon the beach and rapidly breaking up under stress of wind and wave. To Christian Scientists the lesson which an interned or shipwrecked vessel teaches is apparent. Mistaken mortals judge one afflicted with disease, accident, or old age, to be shipwrecked, going to pieces upon the sands of time. A student of Christian Science, however, thinks of one who believes himself incapacitated through any form of error, as simply stranded for a season, confident that when the belief of mortal experience is at an end he will again sail the ocean of life unimpaired and free.
This illustration recalls an incident in the life of the Master. He had found one Sunday a poor lifelong cripple at the pool of Bethesda. Priest and Pharisee saw the impotent man merely as a shipwreck, but Christ Jesus, looking with the eye of spiritual understanding, beheld a man awaiting release from his false sense of bondage. The true spiritual apprehension of the master Metaphysician cured the cripple. Then the very critics who had wrongly condemned the paralytic passed unrighteous judgment upon the first Christian practitioner who had healed through scientific understanding. When these blind judges sought to put Jesus to death on the ground that he had broken the law of Moses by healing on the Sabbath, this friend of man uttered the memorable words, "Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment." Herein the Master asserts that a decision based merely upon appearances—that is, according to the testimony of material sense—is false judgment.
Ever loyal to the Scriptures, Mrs. Eddy has again called the religious world not to pass judgment according to outward manifestation only, but in accordance with the spiritual standard established by Christ Jesus. She has made it clear, through her writings, that the physical senses cannot give reliable testimony concerning man and the universe. Only as with the eye of spiritual understanding one looks beyond visible phenomena to the unseen verities of being, can he pass true judgment. He is bearing "false witness" who fails to hold thought to the true and only man as God's image.
