"Without material accompaniments" NELLIE B. MACE          The human mind assents readily to the scientific denial of the evidence of the senses, if expecting that its suffering may thereby cease. It feels its need on the specific point of suffering sooner than it sees its greater need of redemption from the entire material sense of being. This accounts for the inconsistent complaint, sometimes expressed, that the light of Truth which penetrated material sense in the healing of disease, unexpectedly disturbed sensuous pleasure in the beauties of the material world. All that the human mind knows of its so-called material world is the picture it forms of phenomena which are themselves subjective states of the human mind. This is surely what Mrs. Eddy means when she says (Science and Health, p. 310): "Thought will finally be understood and seen in all form, substance, and color, but without material accompaniments."          The Bible has all along contained the statement, for those who would heed, that the substance of all reality, of all that is good and beautiful and therefore enjoyable, is not to be perceived through the material senses. "Eye hath not seen," Paul declared, quoting the words of Isaiah, "nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." The apostle's words certainly imply that the human heart which yearns for happiness, for freedom to enjoy the beauties and harmonies which it mistakenly supposes Christian Science takes away, can find the substance and reality of all these things through, and only through, the love of God, the spiritual understanding of Principle. This as surely shows that what the human mind believed to be enjoyment, before the truths of spiritual being penetrated and began to dissolve material belief, was at its best only a promise of something real, and in its lower forms was but the sensuous appeal of a material counterfeit.          The substance of all beauty and goodness has always existed everywhere. The human mind's vision of beauty and truth has been limited because of its belief in the substance of matter, and that matter could produce and experience pleasurable sensations. Mrs. Eddy says on page 247 of Science and Health: "Being possesses its qualities before they are perceived humanly. Beauty is a thing of life, which dwells forever in the eternal Mind and reflects the charms of His goodness in expression, form, outline, and color."          The dismay which the human mind sometimes feels when it begins to see that the reality of Life must be without material accompaniments, arises from the vast discrepancy between the present mortal sense of substance as matter and the realization that Spirit is the only substance and being. Yet it is just this knowledge which reveals the foundation of all true beauty to be the divine Principle in which inheres infinite potentiality, all law, order, harmony, action. To perceive beauty as spiritual, apart from sensuous appeal, is to liberate the human mind from its dependence upon matter in every other mode of thought.          In the transition from finite material belief to the grandeur of being in Mind, the application of the rule of spiritual perfection will mean at every step of the way that all objects of thought — the sky and the clouds, the mountains, trees, and flowers, music, companionships, and all activities — will grow more beautiful to the advancing thought as the human sense of them is less and less burdened with materiality. Ascendant thought will look up to the hills, seeing in them a type of the strength and serenity of spiritualized consciousness. The growth, outline, color, and fragrance of trees and flowers will be recognized and appreciated as symbols of the loveliness of holiness; and music will measure diviner cadences in those silent spiritual harmonies beyond material sound. Companionships and associations which are responsive to spiritual attraction will be found more sweet and satisfying than were friendships more materially conceived. All activities will be seen, in so far as they are good, to be reflections of the beauty, or unity in diversity, of spiritual law and order. Little by little, day by day, the material accompaniments of imperfect human concepts will be regarded less and less as solid matter; for the purified subjective sense will behold, as did St. John, the light and glory of the new heaven and new earth. Earth will seem more beautiful when it is seen as a reflection of Mind, not as matter.          This spiritualization of thought, whereby human concepts are seen as phenomena instead of material substance, is the most tremendous influence in the world today. It has an inevitable corollary in the uncovering and destruction of evil as mind. It shows that the material manifestations of evil thought, operating as engines of war, are as unreal as is the evil mind which projects them. It shows that war will finally be overcome, not by counter war maneuvers, which are only a temporary expedient, but by the power of spiritual understanding, which is already replenishing the earth through the perception of the beauty and truth of holiness, and the consequent unreality of material abnormity of thought and its unlovely caricature of power and action.          It was their own belief in a material mind and its manifestation which terrified the disciples when the risen Lord appeared in their midst. They thought they saw a spirit with a material embodiment. "A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have," Jesus told them. It was their own thought of him which they saw as having flesh and bones. Because their thought was not yet spiritual enough to perceive the spiritual idea or the Christ, the compassionate Savior presented to them that which they could appreciate, to substantiate to them his proof of unconquerable, deathless Life. When they were fully convinced of the reality of Spirit and the consequent nothingness of matter as he had taught them, they lost sight of him as matter and received the Truth in spiritual understanding. They could not yearn for the physical presence of Jesus when they had realized the immortal presence of the Christ. They saw him then as he was in reality and loved him better when the Christ became to them the supersensible idea of Love.          Christian Science reveals the absolute truth of being. This revelation will eventually destroy both mortal mind and its phenomena. One does not, however, overcome matter by growing despondent because he can no longer enjoy it on the same basis that he did before the truths of Christian Science appeared to him. Being exists now at the point of perfect beauty, goodness, and harmonious action. The sum of being is to be worked out and up to this point. This can be done only by a process of progressive, selective, spiritual perception, separating the real from the unreal in the individual conception of all things. On page 86 of "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy says, "The pleasant sensations of human belief, of form and color, must be spiritualized, until we gain the glorified sense of substance as in the new heaven and earth, the harmony of body and Mind."          As thought rests loyally upon the fundamental fact that all substance, goodness, form, color, expression, action, — in a word, "the, beauties of holiness," — exist as spiritual ideas without material accompaniments, one grows more intelligently grateful for every advancement in human ideals which at present he sees as accompanied with material forms of expression; for he will see in this betterment an indication that the human subjective states and their phenomena are giving place to the divine, and that this beckoning, glorified sense of being is drawing humanity irresistibly up and out of matter and its transitory promises and failures into the actuality of the vision.   "'Without material accompaniments'" by Nellie B. Mace Christian Science Sentinel, March 16, 1918

 

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