Article May 1, 1920 Issue

One Lord

CLARISSE HALE

Fear was the primitive animus of worship. In his ignorance mortal man, awed, failing to understand the manifold phenomena of nature, thinking also that the good will of the gods would be of material benefit, worshiped the sun, moon, water, storm, and similar appearances. The fear that was excited by these unexplained phenomena naturally focused the attention on the probable or possible cause of all things, which in turn resulted in the evolution of the myths as an attempted solution of the problem. This tendency to worship a mythological god, one of mortal mind's material concepts, was rebuked by Paul when, standing on Mars Hill, he said to the Athenians: "Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you;" and then proceeded to reveal to them God as the only cause and man as His idea, "his offspring," continuing that "we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device." It is perfectly apparent that Paul was referring to the belief of image worship, anciently of stones, the stone and God being identical, later to be separated when the stone became an altar to God. Still the deification of stone and other images has continued, until we find this superstitious idolatry in the form of "lucky stone" which certain European peasants throw into their fields to insure good crops. It is not until ignorance is replaced by understanding that the life and power once attributed to phenomena are restored to their rightful classification, to the one Mind.

With the progress of religious thought we discover a growing sense of unity, but never until we replace objects of sense with the true idea, can we demonstrate that unity with Spirit which is trumpeted forth in Deuteronomy in the recapitulation of the First Commandment, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord." Endowing idols with divine attributes is a mode of mortal thought, the same in quality as that which yields itself to the mesmerism of personality. In that instructive eighth chapter of I Samuel we read that the Israelites demanded a king to reign over them. Why? "That our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles." Mortal mind in its lazy inertness desires only that some one else should do its thinking, its judging for it, and then bows down and worships that one. "And the Lord said unto Samuel . . . they rejected me, that I should not reign over them," and although Samuel prophesied the tyranny and bondage that such autocracy would entail, nevertheless the people insisted on owing allegiance to a king instead of to the one God. To the extent that we allow another to formulate our opinions and judgments for us, that we substitute another's thinking for our individual demonstration of intelligence, we are serving a king; to the extent that we accept erroneous beliefs as consciousness, we are serving other gods. In the relationship of practitioner to patient one should be constantly watchful in no way to usurp the prerogative of the patient to turn directly to God for his guidance, without the help of any mediator.

To-day we deny the power once given to objects and realize that it was belief only that endowed them with attributes they did not possess; we smile incredulously when we learn that the disease supposed to be caused by demons entering a man could be exorcised by a magical formula given for the patient while the medicine itself was given for the purpose of harassing the demon; but is it any less logical or intelligent to think that a demon could thus enter the body and cause disease than to believe in the present germ theory? How can we felicitate ourselves on having reached the stage where we do believe there is one God, Principle or Mind, and that He is Lord alone, until we practice absolutely "the Science of Christianity," which as Mrs. Eddy points out in "Christian Science versus Pantheism" (p. 12), "is strictly monotheism,—it has ONE God." Do we realize that in all our affairs we are dealing with Mind and Mind alone? Mrs. Eddy clarifies this fact when she says, "The Christian Scientist is alone with his own being and with the reality of things" (Message for 1901). As we individually demonstrate our unity, our oneness, with Principle, we shall see in thought and action, in harmonious relations with our brother man, that unity expressed.

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