Editorial May 8, 1909 Issue

"THOU SHALT NOT KILL."

John B. Willis

The command, "Thou shalt not kill," is all-inclusive, unequivocal, and uncompromising. It accepts no excuse for companionship with or the indulgence of any thing or thought that leads to death. The promise is to those only who overcome sin, and who thus escape the disease and death to which it leads, through that heroic contention for righteousness which eliminates from consciousness all that ought to die or that can die.

Whether its end is achieved in a longer or shorter period, in a crisis of abnormity and despair, or in the unnumbered, seemingly normal moments of our consent to the belief that satisfaction attends the indulgence of material sense,—given its way, error always registers its unvarying effect in its own destruction, since it knows and can know no life, no truth.

In the light of Christian Science it is seen that this cycle of mortal belief must inevitably be endorsed and advanced by our every assent to the claim that there is life, substance, and intelligence apart from God. Belief in materiality, its power to give pleasure or pain, to dominate consciousness for good or ill,—this tips the beam in every fatality. Men look to mortal conditions as a life-goal, and whether their course be confined to the anticipated and familiar experiences of a life of sense gratification, or whether it chronicle the headlong extravagance of wilful impulse, in the end they are always deceived and defeated. Whatever the circumstance or condition, all have the same lessons to learn, namely, that the pleasures of sense cannot satisfy the heart; that every alliance with error is suicidal, and that the penalties which attend carnal belief are not escaped from by a mere change of our plane of consciousness. With the pen of a preacher and prophet Mrs. Eddy has written, "Existence continues to be a belief of corporeal sense until the Science of being is reached." "The so-called sinner is a suicide. Sin kills the sinner and will continue to kill him so long as he sins" (Science and Health, pp. 77, 203).

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