WHEN from competent judge or jury of our peers, instead of hoped-for approval we receive unlooked-for rebuke, do we realize that the consequent feeling of having suffered injustice has its basis in vanity? This alone is the source of all sense of injustice. In proof, witness our ready excuses, our earnestly presented reasons (?) for ignorance or folly. We forget that ignorance of the law is a plea never admitted a hearing in court, but feel sure we should have been spared some of the pain. The bitter pill should somehow have been sugar-coated; that is, the chiding should have been given in some other way, at some other time, or to some other person quite as much to blame as we, — better still, to some other altogether, leaving our own sins of omission or commission wholly ignored. What a deceitful thing is the human heart! What wonder that Jesus, with his divine understanding of Soul, would neither trust his own nor any other!
In further proof of this deceitfulness, when we do for a time personally escape reproof while our brother is receiving reprimand, instead of stopping at gratification over our own temporary escape, we get "heads together" in unhallowed criticism of the one being scourged; or silently look in superior saintliness, and shake our wisdom (?) crowned heads in amazement at such display of the sinfulness of sin and foolishness of folly,— as if ourselves sin-and-folly-proof! as if ourselves already entered upon the way of holiness in which we "shall not err"!
Do we realize that Christian Science is sin's rebuke, and nothing else? Its whole work is to uncover to each individual, the sinfulness, foolishness, worthlessness of his own heart — not the heart of another. Only by seeing our own carnal heart as it is, can we know the heart of mortal man. Jesus knew the heart of man, having been "tempted in all points"; that is, having found in his human heart every thing that is in the heart of each one of us. Only his understanding of the Truth of Being could have revealed to him the human heart as the exact opposite of the divine heart of the Son of God.
