THE great Teacher of jurisprudence, the Prophet of Nazareth, Christ Jesus, positively commanded, "Judge not." For this rule of human life there must evidently have been and still must be a great need, or the command would never have been given, for he said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away." The student of Christian Science, in studying the Scriptures and in endeavoring to apply their teachings practically in his own life and affairs, is naturally more inquisitive and more thorough in his effort to get at the fundamental meaning of the various Scriptural commands, than he who looks upon the Bible only as a collection of holy books, whose teachings are not especially intended for present-day conditions.
There can be no doubt that Jesus, in this command, "Judge not," was plainly referring to the very natural and common method of judging from the testimony of the material senses, and he understood fully how utterly untrustworthy such testimony is. He knew the testimony of the senses to be wholly dependent upon the mortal mind governing those senses, and he further knew that this so-called mind looks at everything it sees from its own limited and superficial horizon; that its environment, education, and training entirely constitute its sense of all things. Consequently, since each person in the world is differently constituted from every other person; that, as Mrs. Eddy states in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 224), "there are a thousand million different human wills, opinions, ambitions, tastes, and loves,—that each person has a different history, constitution, culture, character, from all the rest," it follows that no two, judging anything from their individual or material sense of things, would see it exactly alike.
This fact has become so well recognized that it is accepted in all cases of great excitement, whether accidents or calamities, the testimonies of reliable witnesses, given even when under oath, differing so much that often the exact facts cannot be obtained. It is only when we gain an understanding of Christian Science that we begin to appreciate what causes this discrepancy in the testimony and opinion of honest men. Under the light of its teaching we soon see that mortals have but one way of viewing persons, places, and things, and that is from the narrow standpoint of personal sense. Mortal man's entire consciousness is the aggregation of his education, environment, and training, and this inevitably differs from the consciousness of all others. Then how can two mortals see anything in the same way? They cannot and they do not. Then how can one mortal judge another mortal correctly? He cannot and he does not. Hence the command, "Judge not."
