Article March 13, 1920 Issue

There is, perhaps, no one thing which the student of...

The Christian Science Monitor

There is, perhaps, no one thing which the student of Christian Science remembers with greater gratitude to Mrs. Eddy than that she has taught the whole world, if it has ears to hear, that Jesus really meant what he said, when he declared, "The kingdom of God is at hand," "The kingdom of God is within you." For, as Mrs. Eddy writes on page 291 of Science and Health, "heaven is not a locality, but a divine state of Mind in which all the manifestations of Mind are harmonious and immortal, because sin is not there and man is found having no righteousness of his own, but in possession of 'the mind of the Lord,' as the Scripture says."

Here, then, the intensely practical nature of the teaching of Jesus the Christ is brought home to men, and brought home to them at the expense of all their sensuousness. The old idea of heaven as a place to which the soul of a man was to be carried after death, to abide in a condition of semimaterial bliss, is in hourly danger of complete rejection. Instead, men are learning that heaven is a present opportunity, but that the only way in which a man can enter it is by denying, now and utterly, his own materiality, and taking up the cross of Jesus, in the effort to walk in the footsteps of the Christ. At the same time, the cross is not borne in completing a man's at-one-ment with Spirit, but in the hesitations, the resistance, the double-mindedness, which seem to cause the struggle. Surrendering the flesh is not an easy thing when the attempt is made to accomplish it. That is why the human mind fought so strenuously and so bitterly for the ideal of hell and eternal punishment. It realized that if matter were to be sanctified, it must also be castigated; and that it was illogical to retain a sensuous heaven and deny a sensuous hell.

In winning the kingdom of heaven, then, a man stands alone before Principle. His plea, "The woman tempted me," no matter in what form it is made, — and it can be made in half a million forms or more, — is certain of instant and complete rejection. The entire gospels provide a substantiation of Jesus' warning that as a man judges so shall he be judged, and that as he metes out so shall it be meted to him again. It will prove no excuse that the individual acted on the advice of some one he felt knew better than he did. Personal responsibility can never be shifted in divine Science, and least of all can mental apathy or sensuous idleness be made an excuse for shifting it. "Christian Scientists," writes Mrs. Eddy, with tremendous import, on page 442 of Science and Health, "be a law to yourselves that mental malpractice cannot harm you either when asleep or when awake." What is this mental malpractice but the wrongful suggestion of the human mind coming to the individual consciousness? It is quite impossible to say afterwards, I thought this or I thought that, some one told me, or I did not understand,— in other words, the woman tempted me. Principle has no ears for such specious argument and excuse. Before the individual, the road is forever forking; the narrow way leads upward to heaven, and is very straight, the broad way winds gently down to hell.

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