Timely Thoughts HANOVER P. SMITH          Over the door of a safe in a counting-room of one of our large manufacturing companies, is the motto, "Thou God seest me." There is perhaps a fear of God in the mind of the bookkeeper who is intrusted with the accounts of this corporation, that stimulates him to do his work honestly. Being held in check by fear from doing evil has not destroyed sin, neither has it lessened or diminished the temptations. Crime has increased all the same; mankind is only made temporarily better. You can never deliver man from the pleasure of sin, and the effects of it, through fear of punishment. I can well remember the constant fear I had when a boy that God saw me when I did wrong and would punish me; but after all, the temptation grew more enticing as I grew older, until I came to learn my relation to God in the light of Christian Science; then the old theory was among the first to receive my investigation and to be displaced with the divine Love that casteth out fear and uplifts man's being.          We drift for years swayed by traditional teachings, blinded by error; then Truth comes, and we are awakened from our dream, thinking and acting to some purpose afterwards. The anti-scientist has always taught that the seen and the unreal are the real, when the Scriptures affirm that the unseen is the real and eternal. The sensualist or the bigot conceive of no modus operandi for God, but that which comes under his immediate observation; he can have no higher thought of God than he has of himself; the visible, the present, is his measure of existence, and all there is worth knowing in the universe: but his narrow experience is not the boundary of all that is past and to come in man's history. Then let him expand beyond his narrow views of sense; let him think for a moment of the unlimited soul, of Omnipotent Mind, which he should reflect; let him remember that man originally was the image and likeness of this Mind; and in proportion as he grows out of the old man into this likeness, he will behold the immensity of his unlimited Life, which he ultimately must attain.   "Timely Thoughts" by Hanover P. Smith The Christian Science Journal, April, 1883

 

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