That"none of us liveth to himself," is a basic law of conduct that can be neither ignored nor reversed. The individual who runs counter to this fact by disregarding the welfare of his neighbor, is soon bound to be recalled to this phase of his personal responsibility. Where thoughts are things, where thought alone is substance,—the real universe that Christian Science is disclosing to humanity,—a man's mental attitude toward his fellows becomes an even more vital neighborly concern than his acts. The conclusion that no man thinketh to himself thereby appears as a law of conduct quite as fundamental in theory, though its restraint is by no means so readily accepted in practice. In his thinking a man may conceivably disregard the rights of others to the point of anarchy, and yet remain undetected if not even unconscious of his disturbing influence or social injustice. Until such a one takes cognizance of the fact that unneighborly action is always secondary to unneighborly thinking, he fails to see that these two laws are really one, and that the unkind thinking which stops just short of betraying itself in action, may be even more sinister than positive wrong-doing, because it lurks unseen in the shadows, hence unchallenged and uncontested.
If it be even approximately true of human existence (conceived apart from overruling divine Principle), as Herbert Spencer has concluded, that every act of a man's life is the unavoidable result of every act that has preceded it, then it is certain that the moral value of no one of these acts can be judged by itself alone. Yet men have allowed themselves to rely to such an extent on the purely incidental and ephemeral aspects of human conduct as indicative of reality, that a large percentage of human conclusions as to the character and purposes of others is wholly unreliable if not cruelly superficial and unjust. The mental attitude which is often perpetuated on the basis of such unsound premises may be even more brutally severe, because it seems to be so contagious and so blighting in cumulative effect on others, unless this influence be antidoted, as it may be, through application of the laws of Christian Science.
Mrs. Eddy writes: "Mortal existence is an enigma. Every day is a mystery" (Science and Health, p. 70). The seemingly chaotic sequences of mortal existence appear to be interlocked in such obscure relations of cause and effect, so entangled with false concepts relating to heredity and prenatal tendency, that men are not infrequently puzzled to account for their own inequalities of temperament and desire, not infrequently unable to foretell with any degree of surety what turn of the road they themselves would take in any precipitate moral crisis. No man who has had occasion to sit in dispassionate judgment on his own lapses from Christian conduct, can lightly risk the moral embarrassment of presuming to judge the character of his fellows by the shallow test of appearance alone. Herein lies the adequacy of the golden rule as a practical guide in neighborly conduct. Its obvious derivative, the golden rule of thought,—think of your neighbor only as you would have him think of you,—is even more searching, in that it measures not merely the results of our deeds, but tests unerringly the very springs of all action, that which Paul styles the "thoughts and intents of the heart."
