CHRIST JESUS' Sermon on the Mount is a brilliant pattern for human conduct. He knew that the nature of mankind must be regenerated before the spiritual sense of existence can be comprehended and the kingdom of heaven gained. He therefore laid out the plan for individual evangelization, which when spiritually interpreted and put into practice enables men to find purity and integrity to be qualities of divine Principle, God, forever established in their real spiritual nature.
Jesus said, "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God" (Matt. 5: 8). This beatitude closely parallels the Psalmist's song (Ps. 15: 1, 2): "Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart."
Good morals and consistent Christian behavior are of prime importance to every student of Christian Science if spiritual progress is to be made. However, these do not in and of themselves assure divine blessings. Evangelization, or spiritualization, of the human self must accompany these virtues if men are to reach that state of divine awareness in which the misconception of man and the universe is exchanged for the Christ-idea.
Mature students, as well as many beginners, often ask, "Why does Christian Science lay so much stress on transforming the human self?" The answer is that the false mortal sense of man is a state of age-old beliefs, mass mesmerism, or animal magnetism, containing within itself the hard, unyielding obstacles to all spiritual growth.
Until proved to be nonexistent, delusive mental activity, with its silent, insistent demands, continues to seem real and destructive to the human consciousness darkened by fear and ignorance. The Apostle Paul saw the fatal dangers lying in wait for those who remain darkened by evil beliefs, and he wrote to the church at Rome (Rom. 8:6, 7): "To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be."
Christ Jesus brought to light the fatherhood of God and the real man's oneness with Him as His perfect image. When put into active practice, the spiritual understanding of these facts frees men from what is called the curse of the carnal mind with its false claims concerning prenatal mesmerism, inherited sensuality, abnormal sexual drives, bad environmental influences, and the like.
Mrs. Eddy, fully understanding Jesus' mission, revealed the motherhood of God, as well as the illusory and mesmeric nature of evil in all of its phases. The Science she discovered brings to light the real man's divine completeness as the male and female of God's creating, making it plain that he is satisfied and glorified as the perfect expression of the Father-Mother God. From this sacred premise men can and do find their immunity from sinful tendencies inherent in the unregenerate human nature.
In Science and Health, speaking of the time that may be involved in reaching the demonstration of absolute Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy writes (p. 254): "But the human self must be evangelized. This task God demands us to accept lovingly to-day, and to abandon so fast as practical the material, and to work out the spiritual which determines the outward and actual."
Unless individuals make vigorous efforts to find immunity from evil, they are subject to its machinations. If sinful thoughts are consciously or unconsciously accepted as real and desirable, then glossed over, they grow in strength under cover of darkness until exposed and destroyed by spiritual regeneration.
The mere mouthing of the truths contained in the textbooks of Christian Science, the Bible and Science and Health, and the deliberate distortion of their teachings with the abstract statement, "There is no sin or sinner," is not sufficient to deliver anyone from evil beliefs.
Honesty is the first step in the liberation of the human self. Without strict, undeviating honesty it is impossible for the individual to look deep within himself to find out what sin is claiming of him and how it can hinder his awakening to the bliss of spiritual existence, the kingdom of heaven, where man dwells.
The second step, certainly just as important as the first, but often more difficult to take, is the self-determination to deny the evidence of the material senses regarding one's nature and character. Then armed with the truth of man's eternal purity in one hand and moral courage in the other, the individual must so discipline and purify thought and conduct that he refuses to rest from his holy warfare until he has succeeded in removing the hidden sin that claims to give him pleasure.
There are many unlovely traits of the human self that often remain unseen. The hardness of stubborn human opinions, self-righteousness, resistance to honest criticism, profanity, contentiousness, and the like, are wolves—forms of sin—that hide themselves in lamb's clothing, posing as innocent qualities of a strong, decisive character.
The degrading forms of lust, such as homosexuality and adultery, the virus of hate, greed, and hypocrisy, are the swinish elements of the carnal mind, whose sole purpose is to destroy the Christ-idea. To the spiritually unenlightened, these errors may parade as normal states of human experience and the indulgence in them as merely a resistance to conventionality.
Moral leprosy never pictures the punishment which it includes. The Christian Scientist must never condone any form of moral degeneracy. Instead, he must prove sin in all its ugly phases, as well as in its more attractive guises, to be obsolete and without power to attract him or to claim his consciousness as its own.
Mrs. Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 237), "Some people never repent until earth gives them such a cup of gall that conscience strikes home; then they are brought to realize how impossible it is to sin and not suffer." Regeneration will reveal the strong, loving, but completely pure arms of divine Love. Then the human consciousness will find the peace of man's preexistence, where God, Soul, is supreme and His son is found to be wholly spiritual, hence birthless, sexless, sinless, deathless.
In Mrs. Eddy's first sermon in The Mother Church (Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 106—110), the following strong words were spoken (p. 107): "Without a sense of one's oft-repeated violations of divine law, the individual may become morally blind, and this deplorable mental state is moral idiocy. The lack of seeing one's deformed mentality, and of repentance therefor, deep, never to be repented of, is retarding, and in certain morbid instances stopping, the growth of Christian Scientists. Without a knowledge of his sins, and repentance so severe that it destroys them, no person is or can be a Christian Scientist."
The success and prosperity of the Cause of Christian Science, in its healing and redeeming mission to mankind, as well as the success and prosperity of its adherents, depend upon each student's thoughtful evaluation of Mrs. Eddy's admonitions. Each must soberly consider that the world in many areas faces the threat of a serious moral breakdown, a growing decadence that would infiltrate human experience.
The miasma of animality seeps into the unguarded thought wherever the slightest tendency of moral weakness evidences itself. Could this be an unseen weapon intentionally employed by the enemies of the Christ, Truth, lulling the modern children of Israel into such a pleasant intoxicated sense that they will drop their spiritual warfare?
These thrusts of evil will be proved unreal and powerless only as the Christ, evidencing the activity of God's presence and power, is faithfully listened to and practiced in the individual's daily life. In the midst of what seems to limited human sense to be a surging sea of error, Christ Jesus' sweet promise stands as a beacon, "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God."
