Editorial April 17, 1909 Issue

"BE YE DOERS OF THE WORD."

Archibald McLellan

Several years ago our Leader wrote, "Keep your minds so filled with Truth and Love that sin, disease, and death cannot enter them" (The Christian Science Journal, March, 1899). This advice to her students is probably more widely known and quoted among them than anything else she has written, yet Christian Scientists today may profitably ask themselves how fully they are yielding a loving obedience to this wise counsel, and how much they are helping themselves and their fellow-mortals by putting into practice this precept, which contains the pith of our Master's teachings.

To keep our "minds so filled with Truth and Love" means much more than merely to indulge a sentimental or ecstatic state of consciousness, or to hold an undemonstrated belief in the power and wisdom of God. The apostle James says, "Whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." Sin, disease, and death are the subtle weapons of evil, and whoso would avail himself of the freedom offered by the "perfect law of liberty" must be ever on guard to prevent an entrance into the citadel.

Mrs. Eddy writes on page 451 of Science and Health, "Every conscientious teacher ... feels morally obligated to open the eyes of his students that they may perceive the nature and methods of error of every sort, especially any subtle degree of evil, deceived and deceiving." This indicates the alertness which should mark the work of every Christian Scientist, be he teacher or student. A merely passive state of goodness is not all that is required in order to enter into the kingdom of heaven. One must know and demonstrate that "Christian Science goes to the bottom of mental action, and reveals the theodicy which indicates the rightness of all divine action, as the emanation of divine Mind, and the consequent wrongness of the opposite so-called action,—evil, occultism, necromancy, mesmerism, animal magnetism, hypnotism" (Science and Health, p. 104).

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