Article March 5, 1927 Issue

The Seventh Commandment

LOUISE KNIGHT WHEATLEY COOK

"Thou shalt not commit adultery." A dictionary defines the word "adulterate" as meaning "to corrupt, debase, or make impure by admixture of a foreign or a baser substance; as to adulterate food." On page 67 of "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy has written, "'Thou shalt not commit adultery;' in other words, thou shalt not adulterate Life, Truth, or Love,—mentally, morally, or physically." The seventh commandment rings down the ages as a demand for mental, moral, and physical purity, a stern reminder that we are to keep unsullied and uncontaminated that which was given us as sons of God "in the beginning." We are not to make our mental home a sacred place, for it is already so in Truth; but we are to keep it so. We are to stand watchfully at the door of thought, challenging each newcomer with the old cry, "Halt! Who goes there?" And if anything presents itself which "defileth, . . . or maketh a lie," it must be given instant dismissal.

All this is very easy to say; but let us not be disheartened if our progress along this line seems sometimes to be slow, and perhaps fraught with many failures. So long as we are still, in greater or less degree, believing ourselves to be living in matter instead of in Spirit, erroneous and disturbing mental visitors will continue to present themselves. Yet, let us remember in this connection that one gets "what he makes a market for," as the saying is. One may not run away from evil suggestions, but he can know, and prove, that they will come to him less and less as each day he rids himself of some unspiritual thinking; and hence that there will be in him each day less and less materiality to make response.

To evade is not to conquer. Jesus understood this when, in praying for his disciples on the night before the crucifixion, he said, "I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil." To be in the world but not of it is the true test of greatness. One may shut himself within stone walls, or dwell a hermit in mountain fastnesses in his endeavor to overcome the lusts of the flesh, only to find that wherever he goes he takes with him the real source of his difficulty, his rebellious, uncontrolled, undisciplined human belief in a mind apart from God. Repression is not demonstration.

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