IF we look below the surface of human life, we still find that many of its mistakes and tragedies are due to the fact that a sense of injustice is being harbored in thought. This sense tends to produce resentment and a belief of grievance, or even a desire for revenge. Such conditions of thought ultimate in sin and sickness, and unless corrected betimes, they may be productive of crime and disaster. It therefore behooves humanity to examine carefully its concept of justice and to maintain a mental attitude wherein the sense of injustice may be promptly destroyed. The question at issue is not so much whether the person aggrieved has a just reason for resentment, whether an insult, injury or wrong has been received or not. The question to be considered is whether the person in the case can afford to continue harboring the belief of having been wronged.
Metaphysically considered, such a state of resentment amounts to a mental declaration that the injury committed has reality, power, and effectiveness. In most cases this mental declaration also indicates some person as the perpetrator of the evil done, and insists that the wronged person is a victim and so is suffering from the blow inflicted. Those who are familiar with the results of wrong thinking upon human lives and bodies, will recognize immediately the injurious effect of persisting in making such declarations and believing them. There is a Scriptural statement about man, that "as he thinketh in his heart, so is he." The habit of maintaining in consciousness either an injury or a wrong tends to make the person who does this a wrong-doer himself. Unless the wrong or injury is forgiven, it will continue to harass and wound. For their own protection, therefore, all those who are laboring under the sense of injustice, whether or not this belief has a sufficient basis in human thought, must learn to forgive the offense, that is, to make it unreal.
Here Christian Science interposes with its beneficent activity and reveals the only true method of forgiveness,—through the spiritual understanding of the unreality of evil. What, asks the aggrieved person, shall I pretend that so-and-so did not injure me, or rob me, or scandalize me? Shall I deliberately declare that the thing never happened which I saw with my own eyes and to which my present unfortunate mental, or moral, or physical condition is to be ascribed? Christian Science takes such a one aside and in a loving but forcible way sets forth the irrefutable teaching of Truth concerning the unreality of error.
