Editorial October 17, 1925 Issue

Justice and the Law

Albert F. Gilmore

In a statement brief yet comprehensive, Mrs. Eddy characterizes statutory law and makes plain her constant purpose to obey it. "I believe in obeying the laws of the land," she writes in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 220). "I practise and teach this obedience, since justice is the moral signification of law. Injustice denotes the absence of law." Thus our Leader affirms that the essence of law is justice, without which law loses its meaning. The love of justice is deep-set in the human heart. One may, without complaint perhaps, be deprived of property, even of liberty, if it be done justly and in due process of law. But the sense of wrong will deeply rankle if one be unjustly deprived of either.

Christian Science holds that God's government of His universe is always with perfect justice, this understanding supplying the remedy for every sense of hurt. Christian Science teaches that God deals with His perfect idea, man, with exact justice. In fact, injustice has no place in the realm of the real. In proportion as we know this, our sense of injury from the operation of an unjust law will be healed, and we shall be prepared to take an active part in effecting the overthrow of such a false law. Our remedy is always at hand. While being obedient to the laws of our land, some of which may even seem restrictive and unjust, hence no law in the true sense, one may hold, nevertheless, to the consciousness of God's just government of His universe. Such attitude is neither treasonable nor destructive of the fundamentals of democracy, but rather does it support true democracy in its highest and best sense. When Jesus answered his interrogators trying to entrap him, "Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are God's," he established true loyalty as obedience to God and His perfect law, while at the same time recognizing the sovereignty of the Roman empire as entitled to homage from its citizens.

Christian Scientists, it seems, are sometimes in doubt as to the right attitude toward laws which are thought to be proscriptive of individual liberty and, consequently, unjust. Examples of this kind are to be found in certain statutes providing for compulsory vaccination of school children, and the laws at present operative in a few American states which deny the Christian Science practitioner the right to compensation, either directly or indirectly. A citizen of one of these states might easily permit himself to indulge in an aggrieved sense of injustice and self-pity, if he were not ready and instant in application of the spiritual truth. Christian Scientists are minutemen, prepared to meet the attacks of error in whatever form and under whatever guise presented. Accordingly, they will not permit themselves to indulge in either the luxury of self-pity or the sense of injustice, but will, instead, know that God's government is wholly just, that divine law is never abrogated, and that man lives, and moves, and has his being in divine Mind, which is infinitely just. Where, then, can there be cause to cherish a sense of injury?

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