One afternoon, as we were riding on horseback up a mountainside in the warm sunshine, a tiny scud cloud drifted for the moment over us, perceptibly cooling the air in our faces. "What a difference," my friend mused aloud, "even a little cloud can make." These few words of his were enough to open for me a vista in metaphysics which has ever remained distinct and inspiring.
What a difference, for example, a little cloud of wrong thinking can make in human experience. How completely overcasting the little cloud called physical discomfort, or lack, can appear because of its seeming immediacy, unless we look at it in its true perspective, and recognize forthwith the essential unreality of the darkened human sense as contrasted with the radiance of Truth. What we call a cloud in the sky, let us remember first of all, is merely a terrestrial phenomenon in no way affecting the activity of the sun. Though it may seem, from the standpoint of the earth dweller, to break up the sunlight and screen us from its rays, it has never really modified in the slightest that indivisible effulgence, and never can.
Christian Science shows us that the relation of the true man to God is like that of the ray of light to its source. Just as the sun, considered apart from the earth, is sending out one vast brilliancy rather than many small rays of differing quality, so divine intelligence is forever expressing itself in one infinite manifestation, purely spiritual and harmonious. Like the earth cloud which appears to divide the solar light into uneven rays, a cloud of the human mind seems to separate for a mortal the actual wholeness of the divine Mind and its individual or indivisible expression into various unsatisfactory glimpses. The true point of view, therefore, is necessarily that of the divine consciousness, which knows only that its own eternally whole and joyous clarity is all that really exists.
