Nathaniel Hawthorne in "The Great Stone Face" tells the legend of the profile on the mountainside, which was like a great and good man who would some day come to benefit the struggling villagers near by. A lowly lad spent many hours of his youth gazing at the profile and thinking of the goodness of the man who was to come. When he grew to manhood, his resemblance to the great stone face and his goodness of character led the villagers to recognize in him the one for whom they had waited. In the twenty-third chapter of the book of Proverbs it is written, "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he," a passage several times quoted by Mary Baker Eddy in her writings.
The possibilities involved in a change of character through thinking raises the question, "May not evil thoughts come to one as readily as the good?" Here Christian Science takes the field and by its teachings presents through invariable rule the art of spiritual thinking or knowing. It not only tells us that we must know the truth, but draws in unmistakable figure, and with boldness of outline, the ideas and thoughts of God that we are to know, shows how we may know them, and what is to be the result of this knowing in human experience. It lifts us from the arena of ethical speculation over both good and evil to the realm of invariable Mind, embracing the universe and man with its infinite power.
The study of God in Christian Science reveals God as Mind. Mind is All and includes all. What God or Mind knows, is all there is. What He comprehends, is all that really exists. What God knows about anything is all there is of it. What He does not know, is untrue and nonexistent. Thus Mrs. Eddy writes concerning God (Unity of Good, pp. 3, 20), "If He is All, He can have no consciousness of anything unlike Himself;" and, "He can see nothing outside of His own focal distance."
Knowing God, His all-presence, all-power, all-intelligence, and man as His reflection, operates as a law of transformation and recovery to sinful, sick, and poverty-stricken humanity. Everyone without exception may avail himself of this law. It reveals man as he really is; and to know is to be.
Ever since Jesus uttered the words, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," the question has not only been, "What is truth?" as Pilate put it, but also. How may I know it? The truth was clearly presented before Pilate, but he did not see it. Through the life of Christ Jesus it had been lived and declared. Yet to Truth, Pilate's eyes were closed. Had he on the other hand asked Jesus, "How may I know the truth?" probably he would have been answered with such sympathy and compassion that his eyes would have been opened to vistas of reality which are always ready for the humble in heart.
The verb "to know" is pregnant with meaning. It denotes to comprehend, embrace, perceive, to envelop, cognize, understand. It is sometimes used tritely and without much meaning when a profound fact of Truth is announced and we vaguely answer, "Yes, I know." If we could fathom the expanse of true knowing, as it opens the ascent to heaven and leads to the conquest over evil, we should use that momentous word only with a prayer for greater unfoldment of its real meaning and application.
Humanly speaking, God's thoughts are not our thoughts until we see them as such. In our efforts to know Truth we are prone to think our own thoughts, instead of God's, to cogitate in the endless circle of our own conclusions or those of our fellows. We proceed from the premise of matter governed by its supposed intelligence and power, instead of from the premise of Spirit. We accept the false belief of matter, in place of the things of Spirit. Human will, pride of opinion, and fear bind thought to its earthy base, with rarely a glimpse of the light of Mind or the sharp outline of God's illumined ideas. We are apt to accept God and His thoughts in belief merely. We fail to acquaint ourselves with Him and humbly and reverently to accept His ideas into our understanding, thus excluding the beliefs of the senses. In this we may recognize somewhat the attitude of an unruly child who neither listens nor obeys.
For one to know the truth, one must begin aright. God is All-in-all, the only Mind, intelligence, including all true knowledge. In divine Mind is the full embodiment of all actualities. Everything real and eternal is complete in Him, in nature and constitution. The truth about everything that concerns our daily well-being and true happiness has existed throughout eternity, and of its spiritual nature He is fully conscious. In His infinite intelligence all things exist as ideas, eternally harmonious, free from fear or impairment. His supreme comprehension holds them useful and sufficient. In Love divine they are joyous and good. Their identity and individuality He invariably sustains; their benefits He consistently bestows.
Such are the true or right facts about all things that bless and heal humanity. They and all that pertain to them, including activity, law, and power, are inseparable from infinite Mind. Further, we recognize that they are all included in God's highest spiritual concept, man, and serve him and augment his activity and power. Thus we may understand the true facts, or what God knows concerning health, home, church, business relationships, and supply, for, as our Leader tells us, "Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul" (Science and Health, p. 269). In this manner we can know as God knows. We thus obey the Bible injunction, "Whatsoever things are true, ... whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; ... think on these things."
It is natural to ask what effect upon us this scientific knowing has. It bears fruitage. That is enough. Who can say how the rain falling upon dry and barren ground causes it to bring forth the profusion of bloom and blossom on the hillside and to clothe the tree with its green mantle? We expect such a result; and it comes in a transformation which is natural, even as the impartation of God's thoughts to the heart and the consequent manifestation in glorious deeds. This not only brings forth the tender fruits of gentleness, peace, loving-kindness, self-forgetfulness, and forgiveness, but eradicates the injurious weeds of sin, disease, and poverty.
Many a person remembers the nightly chores which, when a lad, carried him to the barn and loft as he tended the family livestock. Would he go forth alone in the blackness of those nights? No. He lighted his oil lantern, which he had carefully filled and trimmed during the daylight hours, and with this light he sallied forth unafraid. Wherever his duties led him, he always walked and worked in a circle of light. No matter how dark was the night, or stormy, he could well laugh at the shadows and the blustering wind. Either in the gray light of a starlit evening or under the blackness of a starless sky, the light dissolved the darkness, and he felt safe and secure.
Evil is as substanceless as darkness. The spiritual thinking which destroys its seeming reality must be as pure and as steadfast and invariable as light. It must be absolute thinking, even though we use it in the realm of material living. Nothing less than the perfect thoughts of God, spiritually apprehended in the human consciousness, can destroy pain and poverty, heal sorrow, and restore the sick to health.
If in the process of reasoning and argument one finds thought straying from the truth, let him turn it back again and again, if necessary, to the spiritual fact, and let him continue to affirm the right and deny the opposite, confident that God worketh in and through true thinking to glorify Himself.
Thus the perfect spiritual facts stand ever before us. God becomes to us the loving Father, infinitely patient, all-wise and tender, presenting to us for our cognition the changeless facts of health and success. In everything that concerns us let us think on these things and ponder with spiritual understanding the absolutely perfect thoughts or ideas of God. Let us reject the mesmeric counterfeit, composed simply of the belief of life in matter. We then shall find ourselves growing into the "measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." As we know these things, thus shall we find ourselves to be.
