Pick up any paper; tune in any newscast. These media are portraying daily, and in graphic detail, crime conditions that highlight the need for protection of the law-abiding citizen and for punishment of the criminal. Much stress is laid on a steady rise in the crime rate, which seems to escalate as disturbingly as the increase in the cost of living. It is self-evident that in the long run the best way to get rid of any need for either protection or punishment is to prevent the harmful condition from arising in the first place. Prevention, then, rightly understood, precludes any occasion for protection, penalty, punishment, or even for pardon.
In the King James Version of the Bible, the word "prevent" consistently carries the meaning of going before or meeting in advance. This sense of acting before an event furnishes us with a helpful clue to crime prevention. We can meet in advance the suggestion that crime is inevitable and that the criminal and his victim are always going to be a part of human society.
A Christian Scientist can tackle the problem of crime in much the same way as he would approach one of disease. If faced with a threat of contagion from without or a malady developing within the body, he first endeavors to eradicate fear. In doing so he invokes protection from undesirable results by insisting on the impossibility of disease contaminating his true selfhood as spiritual idea, as the likeness of a perfect God. In this way he divests the bodily condition of any power to punish or penalize human selfhood through exacting a tribute in terms of pain, weakness, or disability. In applying these same basic truths of Christian Science to crime we must be just as alert to conquer fear by insisting on the ever-presence of all-pervading Love, God, who knows no violence, injury, hate, or dishonesty.
