According to the law of God we have authority over our own thinking and therefore over our own experience. This divine fact is revealed in the Bible, and Christian Science insists that it can be proved in daily life. No one is ever really a victim of circumstances outside himself, nor are there influences beyond his control that can frustrate his good intentions to do what is right. Mrs. Eddy writes: "Know, then, that you possess sovereign power to think and act rightly, and that nothing can dispossess you of this heritage and trespass on Love. If you maintain this position, who or what can cause you to sin or suffer?" PUL, p. 3
This God-given power within each individual gives him spiritual dominion. When it is utilized in daily life, one can totally exclude all discord from human experience and demonstrate in every direction the standard of spiritual perfection. But one's maintaining of this position of sovereign power requires one to hold to it consistently. There can be no moments of weakness when the understanding of individual responsibility can give way to self-pity or self-justification. When things go wrong, there can be no yielding to the temptation to shift the blame or to allow that the error is legitimate because it has occurred through circumstances beyond one's control.
No evil of any kind can enter the experience of one who consistently exercises his sovereign power to think and act rightly. But if, in unguarded moments, error sometimes seems to appear, it can be quickly eliminated when the individual resumes his God-given power of right thinking. A false suggestion of error has to be accepted by the human mind as truth before it can seem to exist, and to accomplish this acceptance the suggestion will attempt to justify itself. So every argument of self-justification on the part of mortal mind must be resolutely resisted.
