Article August 16, 1913 Issue

OBEDIENCE

A. B. FICHTER.

Should the word obedience convey to us the sense of dependence, of being arbitrarily interfered with, compulsion, enslavement, or should it mean freedom, guidance, privilege, opportunity? The sun dispensing its light to the solar system, the song-bird pouring forth his liquid notes, the tender plant upspringing from the earth and bringing forth flower and fruit,—these are obedient to the law of their being; the sublimity, harmony, and order of the universe manifest the results of obedience to law. When in the prism the requirements of the law of refraction are obeyed, the sun's ray inevitably flashes the seven colors of the rainbow, and a perfect rose proves that the law of its being has been minutely obeyed. Why, then, should mankind revolt when the cultivation of the spirit of obedience is urged, seemingly unwilling to give up what they mistakenly regard as their rights of self-government?

It may be that in the relations of man to man, obedience has sometimes meant submission to another human will, subjection to selfishness, usurped power, and cruelty; but this is scarcely the right sense of obedience, since it always implies choice of action. Man, the image and likeness of God, the only one so designated of all the creations recorded in the first chapter of Genesis, must differ from all the rest. The image and likeness of the eternal "I am" must be the reflection of intelligence, and his obedience must be conscious obedience, conscious expression, conscious utilization of law.

Any apparent disobedience of mortals is a self-delusion of material sense, and we learn in Christian Science that it is corrected by the substitution of the spiritual sense, "a conscious, constant capacity to understand God" (Science and Health, p. 209). It becomes plain that as this sense of the privilege of constantly reflecting the divine nature dawns on human thought, the mortal sense of being must yield to the revelation of the real purpose of man, to bring out on earth, as in heaven, the perfect will of God. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" is a requirement of man's true nature; then all his grand possibilities shine forth. We are warned not to eat "of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," because to eat of it means not a pleasant and useful experience, but death, cessation of right consciousness, to know good and evil being contrary to the law of man's being.

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