A Large number of the troubles which harass mortals appear to be produced by personalities thought of as enemies, rivals, or unjust critics. The thoughts and acts of such individuals often seem to offer serious obstacles to the success and happiness of those who are the objects of their hostility, rivalry, or criticism. The result is the breeding of fear, hate, resentment, retaliation, and physical disease. Bad thoughts produce bad health. But this battle of mortals with mortals which characterizes the material sense of life and selfhood is the flimsy counterfeit of the spiritual and real sense of creation, wherein the universal fatherhood of God puts the unbreakable seal of reality on the indivisible brotherhood of man.
Mary Baker Eddy describes the false material sense of existence as fratricidal, which means that this mortal sense of life is often characterized by brother killing brother. But Christian Science shows how, through an understanding of God, of His allness and man's spiritual sonship with Him, every individual can realize his complete unrelatedness to this godless, truthless, loveless sense of creation and find his primal and perpetual superiority to it and disassociatedness from it.
God, infinite Mind, Life, and Love, is unassailable. The one Mind is forever conscious only of its own infinitude, filled with its family of ideas, all knowing one another aright and all understandingly and lovingly co-operating with one another under the unifying guidance and government of their one Mind or Principle, God.
Infinite intelligence, the one and only Mind, does not conceive or know what the so-called material mind calls an enemy, a rival, a critic. These words and the concepts they define are not in Love's infinitude, and so are never thought, known, or feared by God's expression, man. God's manifestation must, and does, share God's complete and eternal unassailableness. Into the omnipresence and everywhereness of God, in whom is His entire manifestation, no slightest force or factor of enmity, rivalry, or criticism can come. The city of God, encompassed by the bulwarks of reality, includes no mentally battling, rivalrous, or critically thinking mortals. No such concepts are known to God and His man.
"Clad in the panoply of Love," writes Mrs. Eddy, "human hatred cannot reach you" (Science and Health, p. 571). A panoply is armor which affords complete protection. This complete protection afforded man by God is in man's God-given realization of Love's infinitude and man's inviolable includedness therein.
But mortals ignorantly, or obstinately, refuse to accept this great spiritual truth that man is spiritual, not material, and is eternally, therefore presently, actually garmented in the vestments of Love's absolute protection, as safe and secure as is God. This fact is affirmed, iterated and reiterated in the Bible and the teachings of Christian Science, and through the understanding of this Science its verity is demonstrated.
"No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord" (Isa. 54:17). Do you believe this? Is this unequivocal assertion of the inability of evil, by any weapon or by any word of any tongue, to hurt man an imaginative conception, or is it a divinely scientific fact? If man is God's effect, either God must be forever preserving His effect or His kingdom must be open to the incursion of evil, and His likeness, man, liable to affliction, impairment, and destruction at the whim of Satan. Which concept do you choose?
To enjoy the unassailability of man by evil we must gain through study, prayer, and self-abnegation the spiritual sense of Life as God, infinite, omniactive good, and discover that our brother is no more what lying material sense says he is than are we. His only true individuality is just as much God's work now as is our own. His life, thoughts, and acts are as much under God's wise and beneficent control now as are ours. How impossible it would be for him then to change his status and character and become an enemy, a rival, or a critic of his brother. What pictures him thus is false mortal mind picturing to our as yet undestroyed belief in it its misconception of our brother. It says in effect, Behold this rascal who would harm you, and be afraid of him.
But we must see that evil, mortal mind, is a substanceless, lifeless fiction in its totality, in its claim both to be cause and to be effect. We can never get far in the demonstration of Truth if we deny that evil is cause but accept as reality its effect—a wrong-minded mortal. The unassailability of man is inseparable from the spiritual idea of cause and effect, of God and man— man considered collectively as well as individually. In God's universe is nothing that can assail or be assailed.
The spiritual idea of cause and effect is the Christ. The Master understood that the Christ was ever present and active in man, ever enlightening his consciousness with the true idea of cause and the true idea of effect. This enabled him so fully to realize the unassailability of his manhood by mortal enemies, or their weapons of destructive force, that he proved his superiority to hatred, the crucifixion, and the grave, and finally to the whole sense of material environment and embodiment.
Never, never, never is man the object of evil's curse. Today, this hour, and forever he is the constant object of God's blessing. As God's reflection he has no enemies, no rivals, no critics, because God, his origin and source, has none.
Since God is all-knowing, evil is unknowing; it does not know what man's true selfhood is. Evil kills its own conceptions, causes rivalry between its own concepts, and criticizes and condemns them. But evil is ever confined in its own finity, unable to exercise any influence outside its own suppositional realm, where it is doomed to self-annihilation. Into God's kingdom it cannot project its negative forces. Against God, in whom is man, it has no weapon that can succeed. There is no bridge over which it can cross from its realm of darkness to Truth's kingdom of light. Man is never findable by evil, for his spiritual nature means that "no man knoweth the Son, but the Father" (Matt. 11: 27), and what evil cannot have knowledge of it cannot assail.
Man, your own true selfhood and mine, is today and forever unassailed and unassailable, for God thus constitutes His manifestation, placing him beyond the touch or taint of a single enemy, rival, or critic, able fearlessly to glorify the One who is All and All-in-all.
