The term "leadership" often crops up in political campaigns. And candidates for public office make it difficult to determine the best leader when they stress personality, style, and image. These rather shallow distractions need not obscure the more substantive issues that call for public discussion and private, prayerful consideration. In an era when thirty-second TV spots, opinion polls, and professional image-makers increasingly are employed to package and sell candidates for public acceptance—much as a manufacturer might market a new brand of soap—it is well to stop and ask ourselves: What are the spiritual characteristics of leadership and, more important, where do they originate?
It is good first to remember that all government, whether international or of a nation, a city, a private business, or a family, is in the last analysis within the purview of God. One of the seven synonyms for God in Christian Science is Principle, a term that reveals the universe controlled by spiritual law—His divine power. Principle also signifies a basic, underlying cause or reason for existence. The other synonymous terms Science uses for Deity are Mind, Soul, Spirit, Life, Love, and Truth.
Just as the science of music assigns individual identities to tones, places each sound or note in proper relationship to all others, and thereby gives each tone purposeful roles to fulfill in creating harmony, so divine, infinite Principle governs its universe of ideas. Each person, each nation, when viewed properly—that is, through spiritual sense rather than material sense—hints at a useful purpose in God's overall government of the universe. In truth, we do not exist as groups of troubled, divided, warring mortals trying to take advantage of one another. Such common misconceptions, drawn strictly from material sense testimony, would obscure the actual reality that man and the universe are perfect reflections of perfect God, the great I am disclosed in the Bible.
