When we look upon the world as it seems today, we behold men struggling everywhere for freedom. There are many forms of bondage, but all may be traced back to one delusive source, the belief of mind in matter or a power apart from God, ultimating in sin, disease, and death. Who does not wish to be free from this triad of errors? Who would not break the fetters of mortal fear, if he knew how? On page 84 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered the way to perfect freedom, tells us, "Acquaintance with the Science of being enables us to commune more largely with the divine Mind, to foresee and foretell events which concern the universal welfare, to be divinely inspired,—yea, to reach the range of fetterless Mind."
Christ Jesus demonstrated complete freedom from the mesmerism of mortal mind. Every human belief in evil was overcome, as evidenced by his walking upon the water, multiplying the loaves and fishes, passing through closed doors, healing so-called incurable diseases, raising the dead, bringing himself out of the tomb, and finally ascending beyond the range of mortal apprehension. How did Jesus achieve and maintain such a fetterless state? Was it not through constant communion with his Father, divine Mind, whom he knew to be the source of all power? He did not claim that power was in himself. Let us listen to his words (John 5:19): "The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise."
In discovering Christian Science Mrs. Eddy discerned the rules which Jesus practiced in freeing mankind from the shackles of sin, disease, death, and all forms of limitation. She pointed out that such enslavement is not legitimate. It is not according to God's spiritual law of goodness that man, made in God's image and likeness, should be so bound by beliefs of evil. Such bondage is the result of accepting as real the claims of mortal mind—the belief in a mind apart from God—that man is a mortal and lives in a material body and in a material universe, that he is a servant to the material senses.
It is important to ask oneself: "Where do I join in agreement with the binding general belief in these evils? Is it not first by accepting the belief that we are born into a material universe and have a matter body, with the resultant claim that this body can give us pleasure or pain?" Going along with this general belief, we pattern our lives after accepted mortal standards, thus becoming slaves to appetite, fashion, and competition. Reaping the reward of submission to error, we eventually find ourselves in pain or distress, and this is the point where we awaken to see the necessity of turning to the divine Mind for help. Then we begin to be receptive to the law of immortal Principle, which heretofore may have seemed restrictive and forbidding. In order to progress out of bondage and to remain free, we must continue to make an active effort to break the mesmerism of agreement with general belief, namely, the inescapable necessity of sickness, sin, and death.
It is difficult—sometimes impossible—to break with one effort a bundle of sticks, but this feat may be easily accomplished by taking the bundle apart and breaking each stick singly. We may well follow this method in breaking the mesmerism of belief in mortal laws which have seemed to bind us. Each one, desiring to be free, may take the stand that as an individual he refuses to give consent to mortal mind's delusion that man is material and lives or dies according to the dictates of so-called material law. One can know that there is no universe other than the spiritual; that the only man God ever created is His spiritual image and likeness; that therefore as actually God's man, one here and now reflects the perfection of God and is governed by the immutable laws of perfect Mind. Since universal consent includes all, the one so withdrawing consent to error is helping to break for all mankind the binding mesmerism of belief in error.
To progress further toward the range of fetterless Mind, one must seek a clearer understanding of God, who is the one Mind. Through Mrs. Eddy's writings one may truly learn of God and hence of man in God's own image and likeness. Here one finds God clearly defined as Life, Truth, Love, Principle, Soul, Spirit, Mind. Then one learns to reason somewhat like this: Because man is the image of Love, he must express everything that is lovely—he must be loving and lovable; as the image of Truth he must express only that which is real and eternal. One realizes that man is the expression of Life, hence can know none of the phases of evil leading to the belief in death.
In the definition of "death"' given in the Glossary of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy says in part (p. 584), "The flesh, warring against Spirit; that which frets itself free from one belief only to be fettered by another, until every belief of life where Life is not yields to eternal Life." The overcoming of death, then, is dependent upon breaking one by one the fetters of belief of life in matter, even every material dependence upon false appetites, wrong habits of thought, the claims of heredity, and results of false education in material law. So eventually, and one by one, we may break the whole bundle of universal consent to the belief in death as the ultimate end of mankind.
When Jesus raised Lazarus from the grave, he said to the loving ones standing nearby (John 11: 44), "Loose him, and let him go." He might have said: "Loose him from the belief that he is a mortal, even from the belief that he is dependent upon you for his care and well-being. Loose him to his Father-Mother God." God is Life, and Jesus knew that no fetters of the flesh could bind man, the son of God, who is made in the image and likeness of eternal life.
Just as Lazarus came out of the tomb and was freed from the graveclothes that had bound him, so we must come forth from the tomb of the belief of life in matter to be awakened by the understanding that our "life is hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3), beyond the mesmerism of the belief of birth in matter. We must know this even to the end of the belief that we must die out of matter. This tremendous demonstration of universal freedom will be attained only through probation and growth in the understanding which Christian Science gives of the allness of Spirit and the nothingness of matter. Such understanding can be attained by each individual as he communes with the one Mind and as he faithfully applies the rules for such Christly living and demonstration, rules which Jesus used and which the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science plainly sets forth in the Christian Science textbook. Not one false belief can stand before the scientific understanding of God and man as revealed therein, for, as our Leader says (Science and Health, p. 303), "Divine Science lays the axe at the root of the illusion that life, or mind, is formed by or is in the material body, and Science will eventually destroy this illusion through the self-destruction of all error and the beatified understanding of the Science of Life."
So, step by step, in obedience to the teachings of Christian Science we may reach "the range of fetterless Mind," where we may indeed draw nigh unto God—even find ourselves with the Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5), thus partaking of perfect freedom from all error and abiding, in the apostle's words (Phil. 4:7), in "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding."
