"The present is ours; the future, big with events. Every man and woman should be to-day a law to himself, herself,—a law of loyalty to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount." These are the words of Mary Baker Eddy and are found in her book "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 12). They are part of an article entitled "Love Your Enemies" and appear at a point where Mrs. Eddy lifts the discussion beyond the question of personal wrongs and their forgiveness and uncovers the impersonal workings of the carnal mind, which would, at this period, increase one's temptations to sin. These temptations, she warns, arise from causes hitherto unknown and should be guarded against. She says, "The action and effects of this so-called human mind in its silent arguments, are yet to be uncovered and summarily dealt with by divine justice."
Mrs. Eddy guarded her movement well. She not only brought to light the absolute Science of being, whereby the present and future impulse of Christian development is greatly speeded, but she also taught those who accept her discovery how to detect the modes of suppositional error and destroy silent opposition which would retard that development. The Christian Scientist has a standard of spiritual perfection to demonstrate—a standard revealed by Christ Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. He knows that he approximates it in the degree of his purity of character and his zeal in furthering the Cause of Christian Science. Science has taught him that man is the spiritually perfect idea of God, divine Mind, and he utilizes that knowledge to dispel the illusions of the physical senses, or mortal mind, which claims matter to be substance and a frail, sinful, dying mortal to be man.
It is the standard of manhood as perfect that makes one quick to observe the mental states of moral inertia and spiritual lassitude that would dull his own and others' love of good. Because the Christian Scientist comprehends evil as one falsity and its nature as "enmity against God," he recognizes resistance to spiritual progress as uncovered latent iniquity in human consciousness, which that progress brings to the surface of thought. He sees that the unfoldment of divine Science to mankind has but entered upon a higher stage of action; that he is confronted with a mental situation which calls for deeper devotion to the truths of God's allness and man's innocency than he has exercised before. Hence he is not tempted to become fearful of world conditions or indifferent to the forward movement of Christian Science. He uses his knowledge of this Science to prove the nothingness of mental influences seeming to obstruct individual and collective progress in the demonstration of man's perfect being in Truth.
