Article April 26, 1919 Issue

Obedience

PAUL STARK SEELEY

In her Message to The Mother Church for 1900 (p. 8) our Leader counsels, "Learn to obey; but learn first what obedience is." To the Christian Scientist no longer does obedience mean the blind worship of an unknown Deity or the idolatrous following of an exalted personage; the slavish submission born of fear and ignorance or the submission by force of circumstance or environment to another's human opinion. Rather does it mean resolute and unwavering adherence in thought and deed to the law of God, which law one has come to understand, and so apprehends as the one law which it is right and natural for him to obey. To live in obedience to the law of God constitutes the only legitimate status and individuality of man. When God's law is ignorantly or willfully disobeyed sin appears, the results of which are sorrow, sickness, death. The issue is plain. Every individual may choose the blessings of obedience,—health, happiness, peace,—or the throes of suffering, the inevitable consequence of disobedience. Certain it is that all must, here or hereafter, come into loving accord with the law of God, be the way of approach by the direct road of willing obedience or by the rougher and longer way which, beginning with disobedience, leads through the hell of mortality until, scourged with suffering, mortal man is awakened and turned to Truth's law.

Obedience is predicated upon and expressed through that state of thought which understands the spiritual oneness of God and man. Ignorance of God precludes obedience to Him. God is limitless, eternal, ever present Mind or intelligence, the one Life made manifest by all His creation. The scientific concept of man shows him to be the idea, or image, of God. Through the fuller revelation of the Science of being, which has come to the world in the discovery of Christian Science by Mary Baker Eddy, this Biblical concept of man is clarified by unfolding the thought of man as the reflection or expression of God. The word reflection is indeed doing much to show mankind how immediately the real man is one with God in every thought and act. One needs but to observe his mirrored reflection and its perfect correspondence with the original in quality and movement in order to get some concept of the perfect agreement with Deity which spiritual man expresses as the reflection of Spirit, God.

Man, then, is to God what the reflection is to its original, and he must manifest in quality, action, thought, and character, complete unity with the one Life. Discerned as reflection, man's obedience to God, or in other words his being in accord with God, is shown to be inevitable. When man is thus understood as God's idea, expression, or reflection, his complete dependence upon and natural obedience to God, Spirit, is recognized, and the spiritual fact that the order and state of his being must necessarily be forever predestined by God alone is made clear. God is the only cause there is. No other cause exists to which man may yield allegiance. Separated from or living in disobedience to God, the only creative cause, man would cease to have a legitimate status and would abandon his rightful place in the universe—his destiny marked as an inexplicable enigma.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

Obedience

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access