In no way, perhaps, has Christian Science more significantly contributed to the advance of Christian thought than in its institution of a higher apprehension of the meaning of law. With a very large number this word has awakened little more than a rather vague sense of an irresistible order of phenomena. They have identified it far more closely with matter than with mind, but if asked to give its meaning, they would at once find that their concept of it is confused and indefinite. With many others, law has signified simply the all-affecting rule, judgment, or determination of a religious or other governmental authority (and the word is thus used not infrequently by the Old Testament writers), while to practically all men it has meant limitation,—not the basis, but the boundary of freedom.
The author of the nineteenth psalm, however, surely had a far more exalted sense of law when he wrote the remarkable statement that "the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul." So also had Isaiah, in his Messianic prophecy, "He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth: and the isles shall wait for his law." In both these instances the recognition of the healing, redemptive nature and activity of Truth, and the identification of the triumph of divine law with the appearing of right sense, opens an entirely new field of thought. The isles are to wait for the coming of law in the fulfilment of the universal Messianic hope, for that appearing of Truth in human consciousness which is the Christ, or Christian Science!
To this higher, more helpful sense of law, Mrs. Eddy constantly lifts the thought of her readers. She tells us that divine law not only uncovers sin, as all standards of measurement disclose false estimates, but that it destroys it, and thus "ends human bondage"; that "Truth, Life, and Love are a law of annihilation to everything unlike themselves" (Science and Health, pp. 227, 243). This scientific apprehension of law as the assertive and corrective activity of good will, or intelligence, working in us for our regeneration, is especially manifest in St. Paul's declaration that "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" had made him "free from the law [or dominion] of sin and death." Here divine law is not a mere fixed order of things, an imposition or domination to which, nolens volens, men are subject; on the contrary, it is that manifestation of Truth which redeems and saves, and which, when established in consciousness, brings "immortality to light." Thus the unity of Principle and idea, the Science of being, and the philosophy of salvation are revealed.
