Editorial August 20, 1921 Issue

Murder

Frederick Dixon

Every people, in every age, have done their utmost to protect themselves against murder. It is the instinct of the primitive man, it is the calculated insurance of the civilized man. In conditions of rude society, where there is neither law nor police, protection assumes the form of killing in revenge. To this day the people of the East will remorselessly track down a murderer to murder him in return. Even in so highly civilized a country as modern Italy, the vendetta still continues. All this has always been so, and therefore the command, "Thou shalt not kill," had presumably a more subtle as well as a superficial meaning, for there are more ways of attempting a man's life than by mere assassination.

At the same time the excuse for murder lies in the belief that life is human, man-given, and destructible. It is the instinct which lies in the animal consciousness, and which was alluded to by Christ Jesus, when he said, speaking of the animal magnetism which constitutes the belief in matter, which he personified as the devil, "He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." This animal magnetism or hypnotism, in other words mortal mind, is nothing but a supposititious belief which is necessarily a lie from the beginning. The only law it can be said to manifest is a belief in death. Everything known to it, from a man to a mountain, or a dinosaur to a daisy, it destroys in time. Its belief in destruction is therefore so acute that there is nothing to be surprised at in the fact that it should have been typified in Genesis in the person of Cain. "Cain very naturally concluded," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 89 of Science and Health, "that if life was in the body, and man gave it, man had the right to take it away. This incident shows that the belief of life in matter was 'a murderer from the beginning.'"

Material education teaches man the lesson of Cain. Not even Jesus' denunciation of the error of human generation, and his insistence on God as the Father of mankind, has been sufficient to convince the human race of the fact that life is spiritual and indestructible. Yet only in the ratio of its grasp of this fact can it hope to overcome the instinct against which the Sixth Commandment is launched, and to begin to realize the truth which alone can free it from the consequences of the lie. Civilization may have curbed the instinct to kill, fear of the law may have made man obedient to the law, but so long as the instinct of life in matter is preserved, just so long must the instinct to kill exist, and so long will it be liable to gratification in its innumerable subtle forms. The most subtle of all of these is, of course, the effort to prolong the belief of man's life in matter, and so fundamentally to protect the instinct to kill. "Above physical wants," Mrs. Eddy says on page 67 of"Miscellaneous Writings," "lie the higher claims of the law and gospel of healing." And a few lines lower she goes on to explain that this law saith—"'Thou shalt not kill;' that is, thou shalt not strike at the eternal sense of Life with a malicious aim, but shalt know that by doing thus thine own sense of Life shall be forfeited."

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