Righteousness is law, and law is that alone which is true. There is, therefore, no law of sin. Sin is the human deflection from the law of righteousness. It does not break that law, because the very nature of law makes it unbreakable. All that there is of a supposititious infringement of spiritual law is an ignorance of it which leads to an attempt to disregard it. Only an ignorance of law could induce anybody to attempt to ignore it. For an understanding of it would be sufficient to convince the offender that he must himself be the worst sufferer. A human law is an entirely different thing. The man who is strong enough to break it may seem to break it with impunity, no matter how just it may be. The man who is weak enough can be made to obey it, no matter how wrong it may be. But the fact that cause produces effect, that like is produced from like, that Truth cannot lie, these are metaphysical facts which no man by taking thought can alter.

The breach of a human law may be forgiven, but it is beyond any power to forgive an attempted breach of law. A man who plants a vineyard of brambles may be forgiven a million times for not planting vines, but law will not permit him to gather a single grape from his thorns. A man who makes a calculation based on the fact that two and two are something other than four, may be forgiven for doing so, but every calculation he makes will end in disaster, in spite of all the forgiveness possible. "Principle is imperative," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 329 of Science and Health. "You cannot mock it by human will. Science is a divine demand, not a human. Always right, its divine Principle never repents, but maintains the claim of Truth by quenching error. The pardon of divine mercy is the destruction of error." If Principle could repent, if it could maintain that like did not produce like, that Truth was not true, that two and two were not four, then instead of cosmos chaos would reign, and there would be no such thing as Principle. Therefore, when Christ Jesus said, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled," he stated an absolutely scientific fact. He proclaimed law in which effect was bound to follow cause without any possible deviation.

If a man hunger and thirst after righteousness, nothing on earth can prevent him from attaining righteousness. Every day the world witnesses people hungering and thirsting after evil, and getting their fill of evil quite inevitably. In order, however, to hunger and thirst after righteousness it is necessary to understand the law of righteousness. To hunger and thirst after a human ideal of righteousness is by no means to be sure of attaining righteousness. For a human ideal of righteousness is not righteousness, but a material concept, itself outside spiritual law. Because righteousness is a spiritual fact, it is law, and absolute obedience to law can always be demonstrated by the attainment of the desired end; in other words, the effect follows the cause. Christ Jesus was hungering and thirsting after righteousness when he went out into the wilderness and fought his battle with unrighteousness. He overcame the appetites of the flesh, the craving for vainglory, the lust of power, in a way in which, because of his understanding of mental causation, these things could not have been presented to another man. Having in this way gained his knowledge of the truth, his understanding of Principle, he came back from the wilderness to prove that he could be in the world without being of it, and to demonstrate his obedience to righteousness by showing the fruits of righteousness, by healing the sick, by walking on the waters, and by raising the dead.