Those people who object to prohibition, qua prohibition, might stay, in their haste, to remember the morning when Sinai was hidden in a great smoke, as it were the smoke of a furnace, and the voice of Principle spake to the people, through the mouth of Moses, the words of the law, the "Thou shalt nots" of the Commandments. That was the old dispensation. Centuries passed. Sinai had given place to Jerusalem; the king of Ai and his wild tribesmen to Pilate, the Roman governor, and the legionaries in their helmets and scarlet tunics. The scene was an upper chamber where the passover had just been eaten; and there Principle spoke again to the people, to all humanity indeed, through the voice of Jesus the Christ: "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." This was the new dispensation, the "Thou shalt" as distinguishable from the "Thou shalt nots," the affirmative as opposed to the negative.
The Bible is the history of the evolution of the human consciousness. That evolution is, of course, a progressive one, but human progress is not an absolute reflex of it. Humanity, that is to say, has not kept pace with the revelation made to it. The people still linger by the waters of Marah, rather than find their home where "the tree of life" bends over the "river of the water of life." There is more of Ahab than of Paul, more of Moses than of Christ Jesus in the human consciousness even to-day. The allegory of creation and the struggle for the atonement is an individual experience, and this being so, the individual must first master the "Thou shalt nots" before he can intelligently utter the "Thou shalt." This, surely, is the experience of the ordinary Christian Scientist, that he relies on argument, to convince himself in his early efforts to demonstrate the healing power of Truth, and only gradually comes to the place where, as the riddle slowly fades from the mirror, he begins to see Truth face to face, and no longer argues over the unreality of evil, but speaks to it as one having authority.
Now the nation is only an aggregation of individuals, so that the nation must bow its neck to the yoke of the "Thou shalt nots" before it can speak with the authority of the "Thou shalt," and the authority of the "Thou shalt" is strictly limited by the demonstration of the individual, a demonstration to be tested by the power with which he speaks to sin, disease, and death. The authority of the man who forbore to accuse the woman taken in adultery, was derived from the healing of the halt, the maimed, and the blind, and from the victory over death in the gateway at Nain, the house of Jairus, and the tomb of Lazarus.
