"The whole armour of God," spoken of by Paul, may be defined as the protective, spiritual consciousness of the presence of God, manifested in goodness, health, holiness, harmony, beauty, and bounty; the understanding that inexhaustible Life is the center and circumference of all existence; that man and the universe are the reflection or intelligent idea of all that God is; that Truth governs all creation with absolute and harmonious power and might; that divine Love fills the world with glory and gladness, holding within its own unchanging loveliness everything that really exists. The armor of God may also be characterized as the conviction that evil of every name and nature did not have origin in the Principle of all being; therefore it never had intelligence, power, nor might. It never was. In brief, then, the whole armor of God is the protective consciousness of the allness of God, good, and the nothingness of evil.
Since this is the scientific fact and is provable, the question naturally arises: How may we attain even in a small degree the wonderful realization of the all-harmonious presence of God, to say nothing of the possibility of reaching the wholeness of such spiritual apprehension, when we are so entangled with the minutiae of human affairs, and so slowly and often so laboriously climbing the steep ascent whereby through understanding we rise out of materialism into the realm of spirituality,— earth-bound as we seem to be and fettered by the demands of the physical senses?
This great achievement would be well-nigh impossible for the pilgrim counting his stumbling efforts all the way, if he did not stop to consider that the admonition to put on the whole armor of God was given by one who had experienced human bitterness when he commended this armor to his fellow mortals; but as the result of noble resolve, patient endurance, and implicit reliance on the gracious promises of God's protection, Paul was at last able to say: "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." Through the power of the Christ, Truth, he escaped out of the hands of wicked men and from the most subtle wiles of the evil one, trusting to divine Love and its ever operative law of blessedness and peace. Not at the beginning of his metaphysical career, but after a long period of earnest striving, Paul acquired an intimate knowledge of the protective law of Love, which enabled him to destroy the asserted laws of sin and disease as Christ Jesus destroyed them. Contagion and pestilence had no terrors for him.
