Obedience to Law

HELEN WARD BANKS

On a Sunday when the subject of the week's Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly was "Everlasting Punishment," a teacher in a Christian Science Sunday School asked her class, "What is punishment?" With almost a wail in her voice a girl answered, "Oh, it is always something horrid." But as the Lesson was pondered, and other questions were asked and answered, the thought changed gradually until at the close of the hour punishment had a new significance.

For many centuries the world believed that God knew evil, and used it by sending sickness or poverty or sorrow to man, who was a sinner. But Mrs. Eddy's great revelation of Christian Science has changed that harsh belief into the beautiful certainty that evil has no reality because God, good, could not create evil or even know about it. The Bible had told us that same fact even before our Leader's time, when Habakkuk wrote of God, "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity." The Bible told us, too, many centuries ago, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him;" but few had thought clearly enough about this spiritual man until Mrs. Eddy taught the world the truth about man as well as the truth about God. When we follow her teachings, we are convinced that nothing is real but God and what He has created, and that therefore evil, whether sin, sickness, or sorrow, has no reality.

And yet we all know that we seem to suffer when our thought is wrong. How can that be? To answer the question we must consider two opposites: the understanding of God which is gained through spiritual sense; and the lack of understanding which is the result of material sense. Punishment is the penalty that is always inflicted on sin, and sin is disobedience to the law of good. Hate, therefore, is sin because it disobeys the law of Love; dishonesty, too, is sin because it disobeys the law of Truth; and materiality, likewise, is sin because it disobeys the law of Spirit. Spiritual sense opens the windows of human consciousness toward God, and enables us to comprehend and love God and all that is good, while material sense, which knows nothing about God, would close these windows and turn human thought only to the things of matter. By its arguments it would try to make us believe that the breaking of law is pleasanter and more desirable than obedience. When it induces anyone to accept that belief, then that person is unhappy in the degree that he believes the falsehood and lets it handle him. When he expels it, the suffering ceases so far as he is concerned.

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