A CHRISTIAN SCIENTIST had enjoyed a particular newscast during supper. However, when a sponsor began inserting as an advertisement for a patent medicine a highly dramatic, minutely detailed account of a certain bodily function, the listener hastened from the table and turned off the radio. He commented to himself that such an intrusion might seem offensive not merely to Scientists but to all those with normal sensibilities. Soon thereafter he himself started manifesting a disorder of the bodily function mentioned.
He asked himself how he could suffer from what he knew to be unreal? Long ago he had demonstrated that the omnipotence of God, good, precludes the existence of evil; that the apparent results of any false belief about God and His reflection, man, vanish with the vanquishment of the belief.
Suddenly he realized that not the statements he had heard, but his mental response to them had brought about his victimization. When he could cleanse himself of ill feeling, he would no longer feel ill. Almost immediately he gained relief. Better still, he determined henceforth to censor his thoughts instead of censuring other people for their deeds.
He had recognized the problem as being much broader than the effects of dubious propaganda from radio and television: on the one hand, invasion of our mental privacy from any quarter and, on the other hand, our temptation toward resentment at whatever unloveliness we involuntarily hear or see. The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, shows us how to shield ourselves from both grievances, although she wrote at a time when not many fancied that voices and images from all over the globe would be entering our homes at the flick of a button.
Those not fully instructed in Christian Science may detect danger from a mental source without perceiving the spiritual means of obtaining security. Of late, more and more widely the mental nature of disease is being recognized. For instance, psychosomatic medicine concerns itself "especially with bodily disorders induced by mental or emotional disturbances," the individual's reaction to an event rather than the event itself determining the outcome.
Christian Science is available to rescue humanity from its own inventions. Science maintains that because God is the only Mind, the creator of all, any apparent development of thought except by reflection from God must be delusive. Since creative Mind is by its very nature constructive, pernicious thoughts must be less than a dream, because they have no mind either to concoct them or to accept them.
Thus, whether destructive thoughts claim to be ours or someone else's, our sole need is to rid ourselves of an illusion within an illusion, a belief that a nonexistent cause can produce an impossible effect on a fictitious subject. Freeing ourselves is as simple as rousing from a nightmare.
Mrs. Eddy assures us in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 234, 235): "Evil thoughts and aims reach no farther and do no more harm than one's belief permits. Evil thoughts, lusts, and malicious purposes cannot go forth, like wandering pollen, from one human mind to another, finding unsuspected lodgment, if virtue and truth build a strong defence."
The Bible provides sound munitions for this, our mental fortress, such as the verse (Ps. 119:165), "Great peace have they which love thy law: and nothing shall offend them." A modern version of the Bible translates the last phrase as, "Nothing can make them stumble."
We must love the law—God's law—if we would be exempt from vexation. To take offense, thus breaking the law of Love, makes one stumble indeed, his indignation objectifying itself in woes both mental and physical. Unless rancor unbars the gates, however, noxious utterances will glance off and fall hurtlessly.
Mrs. Eddy states in her Message to The Mother Church for 1902 (p. 19), "The Christian Scientist cherishes no resentment; he knows that that would harm him more than all the malice of his foes." By the very act of expressing resentment, one confirms in his own experience the misconception that evil is real.
During his earthly career Christ Jesus suffered no resentment against offenders small or great. Even on the cross, he prayed God to forgive those responsible for placing him there. He exemplified the supreme reason that we should refrain from irritation; it is not solely to preserve our own wholeness, but, more importantly, to benefit others.
Physical as well as moral healings resulted from Jesus' obedience to the law of Love. The method, however, remained largely obscure to humanity until, through her own experience and by divine revelation, our Leader became able to illuminate it. In discussing a Biblical episode—the restoration of a demoniac to health—she writes (Science and Health, p. 411), "The Scripture seems to import that Jesus caused the evil to be self-seen and so destroyed."
With "self-seen" as a landmark, we keep our bearings on the Christly road to salvation and, like Jesus, correct mistakes without blaming those mistaken and thus without holding resentment toward them. Exposing error does not entail the publicizing of it, but exposure compels error to be self-seen. Anxious focusing of attention on it would only lend it a semblance of reality. Taking offense at it and resenting it would imbed it in our consciousness and would make us participants in the fallacy. Then how could we aid in saving others from that in which we share? On the contrary, let us expose error and replace it with the truth.
Jesus emphasized too the necessity of untiring persistence in our endeavor. When Peter enquired of him (Matt. 18:21), "Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?" we read that "Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven." By this criterion, genuine forgiveness is more than pardon, more than shallow forgetting; it involves the exoneration of the offender by the complete effacement of the offense.
When in this manner we have thoroughly performed our scientific task, having dissolved error into its original nothingness, we can feel no resentment toward the one who seemed to have erred. We have merely immunized ourselves against the poisons of resentment and hatred; we have proved them to be without substance because without real source. Nought remains to offend or to be offended when we clearly see that all creation abounds in love and so in loveliness.
