Article November 15, 1913 Issue

Only One Law

M. G. KAINS, M.S.

Contrary to much popular opinion, students of Christian Science are deeply interested in the subject of law as related to human progress. A recent article entitled "Some of Nature's Abstruse Laws," by a celebrated natural scientist, instantly recalls several passages in Mrs. Eddy's article, "Spirit and Law," in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 256). For instance, this writer says: "The entire sidereal universe and all that it contains is managed by rigid and set laws. Every law of motion of bodies in space, as suns, planets, moons, comets, and meteors, is known to very high mathematicians with a minute degree of accuracy." After enumerating a few of these laws, of which he remarks, "Perhaps there are as many as five hundred demonstrated laws in the mathematical physical sciences," he calls attention to the general ignorance about them and their workings, and then goes on to say: "Here are the mentological facts: One living in this beautiful world fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years without being conversant with these . . . fixed laws has scarcely glimpsed anything. The case is comparable to that of a person passing hurriedly through a gallery of fine paintings looking at the floor, or going to a theater where all words spoken by the actors were in, to him, an unknown language."

In perusing the article in its entirety, the reader must have been struck with the thought that the author evidently felt for the person who, "not knowing a law of nature, . . . misses at least three fourths of the satisfaction and genuine, not imaginary, happiness" that should be his; for "these supremal laws, . . . equal in transcendent beauty and loveliness, are so much higher than all things human, that they even cannot be compared,—they are in a realm supreme—a world all by themselves." From a knowledge of some of these natural laws and their workings the present writer can understand the feeling which the scientist expresses, but can truly say that whereas the knowledge of the working of a natural law is one of the keenest pleasures that a human being can experience, there is a still higher happiness which just as far transcends it as knowledge transcends ignorance. This is the appreciation of the working of what can be demonstrated only as God's law. For though some of the laws now designated as physical are undoubtedly divine in their origin and working, yet human beings have not so far been able to cast aside their prejudices sufficiently to perceive the line of demarcation and separate the spiritual from the material.

"A falling apple," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 22 of "Miscellaneous Writings," "suggested to Newton more than the simple fact cognized by the senses, to which it seemed to fall by reason of its own ponderosity; but the primal cause, or Mind-force, invisible to material sense, lay concealed in the treasure-troves of Science. True, Newton named it gravitation, having learned that much; but Science, demanding more, pushes the question: Whence or what is the power back of gravitation,—the intelligence that manifests power?"

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