It is a pity that the word salvation has got narrowed down to so purely theological a meaning that it has almost lost the broader sense of general safety which it inherits from its Latin ancestor. If this were not the case, if it had not acquired a meaning of salvation from future punishment, the world would understand more easily the wide definition give to it by Mrs. Eddy, on page 593 of Science and Health: "Salvation. Life, Truth, and Love understood and demonstrated as supreme over all; sin, sickness, and death destroyed." Mrs. Eddy knew quite well that salvation was no miracle wrought through the person of Christ Jesus. She understood perfectly clearly that when Paul bade the Philippians work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, he was bidding them master that understanding of Principle or Love, to which the apostle John referred when he declared that perfect love casteth out fear. Mankind, she realized, had to be saved from the old view of salvation, the view which scholasticism had intrenched itself behind in the Middle Ages, and from which modern thought was only slowly freeing itself. "Behold." Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation," meaning clearly by this that a man's salvation was wrought out in the eternal now in the degree with which he mastered the fact that Principle was Love, and that his salvation, from everything unlike Principle, rested in his recognition of the truth that Love was omnipotent as well as infinite.
Salvation, then, is, as Mrs. Eddy says. "Life, Truth, and Love understood and demonstrated as supreme over all." When a man once masters the fact that Life is eternal, the sting is taken out of death forever; when he realizes that Truth, is all that exists, he understands that the lie of death, like every other lie, is something he had been falsely led into accepting and that a knowledge of the truth, as Christ Jesus declared, must free him from the power of all lies, including the great mysterious lie of death; and when he recognizes the omnipotence of Love, he sees Principle as harmonious, indestructible Truth, against which neither the gates of hell nor any other lie can prevail. And just in the proportion in which he makes all this knowledge his own, he enters into the peace of God which passeth all understanding. Then it matters not to him what any human being may say or do. No matter what the vapid fury of human anger may attempt to perform, he is conscious that none of its manifestations can move him. His safety lies not in the approbation or the condemnation of men but in the fact that Principle, Life, Truth, and Love, are manifested in law and that, as long as he is obedient to law neither the praise nor the execration of the human mind can touch him. This is the awakening to Truth to which Mrs. Eddy refers, on page 230 of Science and Health, when she writes: "This awakening is the forever coming of Christ, the advanced appearing of Truth, which casts out error and heals the sick. This is the salvation which comes through God, the divine Principle, Love, as demonstrated by Jesus.''
It is this demonstration of Truth which is the beacon light on which the individual must rely to guide him through the darkness of the night of evil suggestions. If it were not for this he would be like the sailor without a compass, he would have nothing to tell him if he were being obedient or disobedient to law. Possessed of this test of demonstration, however, he has no excuse for missing his way. For, though no other human being may be able to tell what his demonstrations are, though the world may be misled by experiences which are not demonstrations at all, he, in his heart of hearts, knows perfectly well whether the deep things of God are being opened up to him and whether this opening up constitutes a true understanding of Principle, which enables him to prove the power of its salvation in the destruction of his belief in sin disease, and death. If he is really demonstrating his understanding of Principle, his knowledge of the truth that frees, then he is becoming more and more assured of his safety amidst all the threats and passions of the world. He is beginning to understand precisely what the psalmist meant when he wrote. "A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee."
