Article September 5, 1908 Issue

THE NEW COMMANDMENT

PROF. JOEL RUFUS MOSLEY.

Before the human sense of love is made perfect, it has a marvelous capacity for detecting the claims of evil; but Science separates these claims from the facts of good and never sees evil as a person. Love never fights evil as a real entity; it never tries to overcome evil with evil; it never hates or injures the seeming servants and victims of evil, but loves and does good to them and thereby separates and saves them from their sins. Love detects and uncovers sin, "not in order to injure, but in order to bless" (Science and Health, p. 453) the servants and slaves thereof. It does not see the claims of evil in order to make a reality and a stumbling-block of them: but to prove them unreal, and to make their seeming reality incentives to overcoming and to the realization of that perfect love which thinks no evil, which has no sense of reality but that of good. Science does not uncover the claims of evil through personal knowledge of or sympathy with evil, but through its knowledge of good.

The belief in the unreal does not, and cannot know the unreal as an unreality; it is only as we emerge from the belief of unity with and dependence upon evil, that we really know and prove the unreality of evil and the vital and all-sufficient reality of the good. Darkness does not see darkness as the absence of light; only the light and those who have the light can see and realize this. Hate does not see hate as impersonal, as a false claim, as an illusion, as an unreality; love, and only love, does this. In like manner, it is seen that no negation, no error, no sin has true perception either of any evil or of any good. Only the all-good, only Love, sees and knows anything aright. It is the knowledge of the true, the real, and the good which enables us to destroy the seeming reality of the false, the evil, and the unreal. While evil seems to be self-destroyed,—and in one sense is so destroyed, in that it suffers the very doom it wills for the good, and has nothing to blame but itself,—its destruction in a still higher sense comes through the appearing, the perception, the recognition, the love, and the reflection of good; and this is the coming or the appearing of Christ, whether so recognized and named or not.

So long as we yield to the temptation to meet hate with hate, evil with evil, wrong with wrong, injury with injury, we do not handle evil, but evil handles us; we do not overcome evil, but evil (in belief) overcomes us. When we meet all hate with love, as well as all love with love; when we bless them that curse us, as well as them who bless us: when we do good and only good to our seeming enemies as well as to our real friends,—then we not only successfully handle and overcome evil, but evil also becomes unreal to us as an intelligence, entity, or person: it even disappears as a false claim. All that evil ever seemed to have done against the good is seen to have worked for the good of the good and for its own undoing. In a word, it is seen that God is and always has been All-in-all, and that there is, therefore, no real evil.

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