Article October 29, 1932 Issue

God's Law of Prohibition

PAUL STARK SEELEY

GOD'S law of spiritual reality prohibits or excludes eternally all evil. Deity's law of prohibition can never be modified or repealed. It is as permanent as God's allness, for it is inherent in and constituted by His allness. This law, which forever bars all evil from God's kingdom, is conceived by Mind's omniscience, enforced by Mind's omnipotence, and evidenced by Mind's omnipresence. Of this law Mrs. Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 243), "Truth, Life, and Love are a law of annihilation to everything unlike themselves, because they declare nothing except God." The prohibition of evil is primarily a divine, not a human, enactment.

Human thought does not yet fully accept the allness of God or concur in God's law of prohibition. Because it considers life to be in matter, it believes that pleasure is found in material sensation, and ascribes to alcohol the power of stimulating pleasurable material sensation. This mistaken state of thought contends that it is subject to no law but its own willful desires, and that one has a right to do as he pleases. This attitude is due to ignorance of the creator's law of perfection, which, humanly applied, means that one has the right to do as he pleases only as he pleases to do right.

Indulgence of the desire for alcoholic liquor is wrong primarily not because some persons have said it is wrong, or because a national law is aimed to prohibit the use of intoxicants. It is wrong because such indulgence accentuates and stimulates the false material sense of life, which is the opposite and opponent of the one true Life, or Mind, God, whom man expresses. Alcoholic liquor is an instrument of mortal mind through which it feeds the fire of its own falsity. As a means through which the animal, carnal, sense of life expresses itself, it inflates, exhilarates, and would, if it could, perpetuate this false sense; and, therefore, use of it dulls thought to the verities of spiritual existence and spiritual manhood. "Strong drink," states Mrs. Eddy on page 289 of "Miscellaneous Writings," "is unquestionably an evil, and evil cannot be used temperately: its slightest use is abuse; hence the only temperance is total abstinence."

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