A MATERIAL structure, regardless of how strongly it is built, is only a superficial type of protection. It is not a basis for true security. Our real security is based on our oneness with God as His reflection and must therefore be mental. We are expressing our unity with God when we have performed a kind deed, righted a wrong, or practiced equanimity in the midst of an aggressive situation. We should then feel protected in our right activity.
But in the most securely built material refuge, we should not feel safe if we are hating our neighbor, resenting business associates, or condemning family or fellow church members. Hatred, resentment, and condemnation put us on the defensive, making us vulnerable to evil. The strongest available material protection will not secure peace of mind if we are harboring these propensities. The first step, then, toward finding protection is to keep ourselves free from evil.
Evil must be recognized as wholly mental. If it enters the door of thought, a mental cleansing is then a logical step. However, one does not clean a house and leave it bare; he does whatever is needed to make it useful and beautiful. So with mental housecleaning. When error is cast out of our thought through the cleansing properties of truth, spiritualization beautifies our consciousness. Love for our neighbor occupies the space where hatred lingered; forgiveness perfumes the atmosphere, expunging the foul odor of resentment; compassion lights up all the corners of our thinking, eliminating the darkness of condemnation and criticism. Our mental home is truly secure when it is imbued with these qualities.
A second step toward true security is learning truly to love. Mrs. Eddy writes, "Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you" (Science and Health, p. 571). As we put on this cover of Love, wrapping ourselves in its warmth, the ice of hatred and human reserve, which at times tends to freeze us, melts away. When Love envelops us, its warm glow is felt by everyone in its vicinity. Since Love is impartial in its gifts of good, our reflection of God, Love, helps us to love even those who seem distant and those who openly oppose us. Love shows us how to discern the false traits claiming to be persons and so to detach them from thought that only the consciousness of the truth of man, made in God's image, remains.
It is comparatively easy to love those who love us, but we must break down the belief that exclusiveness—seeking to be only with those who are in accord with us—affords security. Instead, we must seek security in that Christlike love which Jesus had for mankind, the love which includes and is charitable toward all. Love for one another fulfills divine law and obliterates the beliefs of evil which seem to prevail. As we truly love our neighbor as the child of God, our belief in an enemy dissolves.
The teachings of Christian Science are consistent with that which Christ Jesus called the second great commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Matt. 22: 39). This commandment claims for our neighbor the same protection from the ills of the world that we claim for ourselves. Where love is, hatred simply has no place. And where love is, refuge is. This all-embracing love, spreading like ripples on a pool, honors God as the tender Father: of all, under whose protection we may feel secure from all forms of evil.
A third step in the gaining of security is learning to discriminate between the real and unreal thoughts which come to us, and this regenerates our thinking. "The time for thinkers has come," we read in the textbook (Science and Health, p. vii). Any destructive elements which appear are not our true thinking at all, but are only evil claiming to be our thought. All real thought is good, the reflection of Mind.
When thinking is spiritually regenerated, suspicion gives way to trustfulness, exclusiveness to inclusiveness, and retaliation to forgiveness. As this reformation permeates individual thought, the demonstration of good expands, and mankind as a whole benefits, for the action of Mind is at work in human consciousness.
What of the fears of the world which are expressed, broadcast, and held before us repeatedly today? Are we to ignore them, brushing them aside with stale repetitions of statements of truth? Of course not. Christian Science teaches us not to ignore error but to heal it.
The Bible tells us to put off the old man and to put on the new. To accomplish this, we must be spiritually regenerated. We must constantly be about our mental house-cleaning. We must learn more of God and consistently strive to be Godlike. By putting off the old man of human fears for the present and for the future, we can through absolute trust in God and confidence in Life as ever present put on the new man, the reflection of God.
Mind's omniaction includes the preservation and intactness of His image and likeness and comprises God's omnipotent good for His children. Man's continuing existence is as necessary to God as God's is to man. The energy of Spirit is eternally present to give newness of life through regenerated thinking, which dispels fears and supports the individual's acknowledgment of one supreme God. The divine plan does not include means for mankind to annihilate itself.
During the severe bombings of World War II many Christian Scientists were guided to safety through their earnest prayers. Some were led not to retire to a specific material place for protection but rather to strengthen their mental citadels right where they were. The truths of the ninety-first Psalm were just as effective then and are as potent today as when David first voiced them many centuries ago. In the ninth and tenth verses, as one turns his thought unreservedly to God, he may find assurance of the divine safeguard: "Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling."
The next verse gives the reason for this confident trust: "For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways." In the textbook "angels" are defined as, "God's thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect; the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality, counteracting all evil, sensuality, and mortality" (p. 581). This definition, then, is the divine counteraction for the erroneous mortal belief of evil's supremacy, revealing its utter powerlessness as mindless matter.
Throughout the Scriptures are reassurances of God's ever-present protection. The Bible truths are applicable to every modern issue challenging mankind today. Jesus said (Luke 21:9-11): "When ye shall hear of wars and commotions, be not terrified: for these things must first come to pass; but the end is not by and by. . . . Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven."
After this fearsome prophecy comes the comforting promise (verse 18): "There shall not an hair of your head perish." Here, indeed, is the assurance for now and for all time to come of our preservation by divine Mind. Our security rests with God.
