One day the writer was walking up a hill just on the outskirts of an industrial town, and on reaching the top turned to enjoy for a few moments the clear air and the prospect about him. Away beneath lay the factories and workshops of the town, also the works where he himself was employed. As he stood there taking in the picture, he noticed how small and comparatively insignificant these objects seemed when viewed from the height, while above, stretching from horizon to horizon, was the great arch of the sky, and over the crest of the hill were fields and hedgerows, clad in all the glory of late summer, all combining to make the objects below look still smaller by comparison.
His thoughts went back to an office in those works where he well remembered times when he had felt himself to be just a small unit in the whole concern and literally swamped by the various problems of the day to the exclusion of all else. How different that morning was the mental picture which presented itself; and it was with a feeling of gratitude that he realized how he had slowly and sometimes laboriously been climbing up the mental heights of spiritual understanding, for from the elevation, however slight, which he felt he had gained, things took on a more correct proportion in his consciousness, and he realized—to some extent, at any rate—that instead of his being merely a part of the human machinery in a business concern, the whole concern existed for him as a part of his own mental concept, and became for him harmonious or discordant according to the state of his own consciousness.
How typical is this of the experience of all mankind in the mental journey from matter to Spirit, or as Mrs. Eddy puts it, "from sense to Soul, from a material sense of existence to the spiritual, up to the glory prepared for them who love God" (Science and Health, p. 566). To the materialist the mind or consciousness of man seems to be shut up in a material body and to be at the mercy of a material organism,— brain, nerves, and so on. It seems to be governed by arbitrary laws, supposed to be laws of this so-called substance matter, though in reality they are nothing more than false human beliefs.
