To the suffering mortal who has gone so far in the process of salvation as to ask for help, Christian Science says, "No law of God causes misery. No law of Wisdom operates injuriously. It is a false law, or a false sense of law, which ends in discord, and you need not suffer." Here, then, at the outset, the beginner in Christian Science is confronted with a question of law, which he must answer, with entire satisfaction to himself, before he can go far in his exploration of the new country, the Promised Land. It is of no avail that he pleads, "But I am no lawyer, have no legal talent, no aptness for logic. I am helpless to decide abstruse legal questions." That is the root of the trouble. We have been governed by something called law, without knowing what it was. We have complacently permitted the most cruel and arbitrary dictation, and have never questioned the right of the law-making power. It is because we have not been lawyers, that we have suffered. It is most important that we know what law is, and what it is not, what good law is, and what bad law is, and by the time we have won our way to an understanding of what constitutes beneficent law, we shall have discovered also, that there is no other kind.
There is no law without a lawgiver, and so, quite naturally, the thought of the man, just aroused to inquiry, seeks the source of law, in his effort to discriminate between the good and the bad. When we know what it is that makes a law, and something, if only a little, of the nature, character, and essence of the power back of it, we may surely know the qualities of the law itself. Again, it is most necessary that the careful searcher should satisfy himself as to the inherent right of the law-maker to formulate a code that is to require the adherence of many.
Our crude ideas include the concession that something can make laws for us; but we demand, back of these laws, organized government, authority, power. We have, for example, a series of statute laws in each state. Be they good or bad, the citizen does not hesitate to obey them because he readily grants that there is some show of authority for them. He tells you that the legislative prerogative is vested, by the people themselves, in a body of men who are the official law-makers for the state. He may question a good deal of the product of this legal machine shop, but he never stops to doubt the right of the body which he himself has helped to create.
