It was summer on the farm. Two boys, eight or nine years old, scampering over the fields, came to a standstill on a hillside. Below lay a sizable pond. To the right ran a row of oaks along the lane. "How did the water get there?" asked the younger lad. No reply from his companion. "What put the trees by the fence?" Again no response. "Where did we come from?" The silence continued, because the older boy was preoccupied with the same problems, without courage to voice his thought either in question or in answer.
Who has not been stirred by these or similar speculations to recognize that divine intelligence, mighty and beneficent, is at work in the world! It prompts the individual to ask, and intimates the answer. It shapes the leaf, shapes it faultlessly, not imperfectly for the day only as to us appears. Likewise, this intelligence glorifies the countryside, wheels the earth in its orbit, animates and enlightens man. The evidence is conclusive, to the enlightened observer, that Mind, all-knowing and all-creative, envelops and governs the universe. Relying on personal or human sense, we do not see the world and the things therein as the all-comprehending Mind fashions and sees them. We behold them, as it were, through a mist obscurely. Even so, they possess an interest and charm which moved Mary Baker Eddy to comment on page 87 of "Miscellaneous Writings": "To take all earth's beauty into one gulp of vacuity and label beauty nothing, is ignorantly to caricature God's creation, which is unjust to human sense and to the divine realism. In our immature sense of spiritual things, let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: 'I love your promise; and shall know, some time, the spiritual reality and substance of form, light, and color, of what I now through you discern dimly; and knowing this, I shall be satisfied.'"
Landscape, forest, and lake nonexistent? Of course they are not. They simply are blurred and misinterpreted by human sense. This misinterpretation we call matter. Matter is not a thing, but a misapprehension of things. Hence its unreality. Similarly, a mortal is not a man, but a misconception of man. Human sense, under the impulsion of Christian Science, will so clarify as to perceive a better and better outer world, until some day we shall apprehend the objects and creatures about us as they are, in perfection and permanence. In that day we shall comprehend ourselves, not mistakenly as material mortals, but truly as spiritual immortals in the likeness of Him who made us.
