Justice

Duncan Sinclair

The question of justice is one which often exercises the thoughts of mortals. Oppressed as many are by the seeming injustice of their fellow-men, time and again they turn to its contemplation only to be baffled by the seemingly inscrutable nature of their plight. They may glance back over history, over the history of every nation which has been chronicled, to find that evil has ever stalked like a grim specter through their records, trailing after it an unnumbered host, the victims of its injustice. They may look around them to-day and see the same iniquity at work, undermining the health, the happiness, the joy of mankind. Uninstructed as they are in Christian Science, is it any wonder that a great wail goes up from stricken humanity?

Now it has to be said at once that there are many signs in the world to-day that its peoples are awakening—many of them slowly, it is true, but awakening they are to the great fact that justice and law are inseparable, or as Mrs. Eddy has written in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 391): "Justice is the moral signification of law. Injustice declares the absence of law." In national or international relationships nothing is truer, and nothing can be surer, than that injustice, either between individuals or between nations, will cease exactly in proportion to the obedience of individuals and nations to law. What would result if all the civilized peoples in the world subscribed to and obeyed the Decalogue? What would happen were the Beatitudes to be obeyed by every individual in every nation? The questions need no reply. And when one thinks of it, do not those laws which are to be found on the statute books of enlightened nations, and which sustain equity and justice, owe their origin to the higher moral and spiritual codes which have received the assent of civilization, generally, and are the very marrow of Christian life and conduct? Justice, for example, was blazoned forth by the laws of the old Hebrew nation, thus: "Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure. Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have: I am the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt." Justice was stamped on all the Master ever taught. "Judge not, that ye be not judged," he said. "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

But apart from these considerations of justice, there is another aspect; and this Christian Science presents to its students. As was pointed out above, mankind suffers greatly from the belief of injustice, which is one of the seeming effects of evil. Here is where Christian Science comes in with its power to heal: it declares the truth that evil is unreal. Holding to the fact that God is infinite good, it draws the perfectly logical deduction that evil has no reality; that evil is false belief—an illusion of so-called mortal mind. And since evil is unreal, what about injustice? It is equally unreal—altogether a myth of material sense, that erroneous sense which seems to dispute the truth which spiritual sense reveals.

Does not the teaching of Christian Science, then, put a very different aspect on the whole question of justice? It simply lifts it from the slow-working methods of men, with their more or less imperfectly devised codes, to the clarified region of absolutely correct spiritual thinking.

In Christian Science practice it is found that disease is sometimes directly traceable to a sense of injustice believed in and entertained. It will not benefit the case to sit deploring the wicked, unjust ways of evil! The belief of injustice may indeed appear to be there. If so, one's eyes cannot be shut to it; but the Christian Scientist must see through the illusion of injustice; must realize the allness of good, and be able thereby to deny that evil, including its seeming effect—injustice—has either real presence or real power.

On the page already quoted from, Mrs. Eddy says: "Disease has no intelligence to declare itself something and announce its name. Mortal mind alone sentences itself. Therefore make your own terms with sickness, and be just to yourself and to others." What a blessing to know how to be just to one's self and to others through the understanding of the law of God! There is untold consolation in the fact that the number of those who are learning through Christian Science how to defend themselves from the false belief of injustice, is steadily increasing. Even now a great multitude are aware that it is the denial of the reality of evil—through the understanding of the allness of God, good—which protects from injustice and which will ultimately destroy that scourge in the world.

Duncan Sinclair

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The Universality of Good

August 30, 1924

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