Right Thinking

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 94, 14 January 1939, Page 1 (Supplement)

Right Thinking

4 4 • T is a great moment in a man’s life when he discovers that what I he looks at with his eyes and what he hears with his ears are not I the most significant things,” observes Dr. F. E. England, Ph.D., on X the subject of “Right Thinking.”

“Our senses are wonderfully keen and active, but they are concerned mainly with the bare marks and lines xliicb serve to awaken a sense of meaning in the mind. The words of a telegram can be seen by a child or an illiterate person, but they may convey no intelligible meaning. A bouse may be a mere structure to one person; to another it may awaken a whole world of memory and meaning.

“To the discerning person every material object is a window through which he peers into another world. If you look at the window you see a window ; if you look through the window, you apprehend something meaningful. Two people look at a great national pageant. To one it is a spectacle of people and colour; to the other it is a vision of the soul of his country. Our country is not composed merely of lands, tiees, houses and factories. The core of its reality consists of the traditions and sentiments of which all its material institutions are but the embodiments. “The history of the human race is the history of thought. The true records of mankind are not to be found in shifting geographical boundaries or in the undulations of material prosperity and adversity. The real annals of history are the ideas, the sentiments, the passions, the virtues and the

guilt of living men and women. In these realities of the mind lies the secret of the successive forms of civilization and of the rise and fall of peoples. According to the quality and content of a people’s thought, so is the quality of its life. . . .

“Tlie curious and mercenary mind measures the material potency of the sunshine; the man of spiritual discernment sees in it one form of expression of a divine potency which . . . streams from the hills and descends to the plain And sweetly distils in the dew and the rain.

The artistic mind' does not necessarily pass beyond a state of sensuous appreciation of the sublime or beautiful object. The religious mind sees in it a revelation of something sublime and beautiful at the heart of things. Ihe moralist recognizes a strong compulsion in the sentiments of duty and loyalty; the devout person traces these feelings to their source in a moral consciousness superior to his own.

“The truly religious mind, from which all vestiges of magic had departed, would see the activity of God in nature’s processes of growth and harmony, loveliness and fulfilment. The seed growing secretly would bear testimony to the faithfulness .of the Creator. The heavens would declare glory of God and the firmament show His handiwork. Day unto day would utter speech, and night unto night would show knowledge.”