CHRISTIAN SCIENCE strongly emphasizes the clear logic and great wisdom of the Master's "beam" and "mote" advice, as the direct way to a settlement of all disagreements. The turning of one's thoughts from another to one's own consciousness surely is the effectual way to "agree with thine adversary quickly" and to settle the difficulty. But, after removing the temptation to personalize each fault in another, and adopting the wise course to look first within, one finds himself confronted by a difficulty of greater magnitude; namely, the correct disposition of the beam, a task beset by several serious dangers.
The first danger which lurks in the path of every earnest striver is a false estimate of what one needs to know of the beam; the second is the disposition to cast it out by some mental attitude other than spiritual understanding. In the diagnosis of the error in one's own consciousness, one may be misled, and very much so, by a suggestion that (as a recent writer honestly puts it) "the only place out of which we have to cast evil is our own consciousness;" hence, one's own concept of evil must be the whole of evil. Thus the conclusion is reached that one needs to protect himself from his own false beliefs alone; therefore, that the only wrong thinker or mental malpractitioner there is or can be is one's self.
Thus, in a desire not to fix the sin on a brother, the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, and the beam in our own eye has become the whole of evil! In the correction of this error, one need only ask, Of what does one's human concept consist, and what creates it? If it were true that our own concept of evil created itself; in other words, if the sinner created himself and all sin, then it would be true that one would never need to consider aught or to protect himself against aught but his own thoughts. But Christian Science teaches that "one's concept of error is not the whole of error. . . . the lie was, and is, collective as well as individual" (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 67).
