Article September 30, 1939 Issue

No Personal Condemnation

ALICE CORTRIGHT

What a glorious release it would be, were self-condemnation and condemnation of others lifted from mankind! Personal condemnation is entirely useless and illegitimate. A concise illustration of its powerlessness is recorded in the eighth chapter of John's Gospel. The scribes and Pharisees brought an adulterous woman to Jesus as he was teaching in the temple. Instead of replying in kind to their accusation, Jesus, the record states, stooped down and wrote upon the ground. To their continued questioning, he finally responded, saying, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her," thus placing squarely upon each individual the responsibility for his own thought and consequent action. Here it must always remain.

Jesus, the master Christian, was acutely conscious of spiritual man's unity with God. To his clear vision, man was eternally pure and Godlike. Only by turning away from that high standard and accepting the material illusion, or untrue concept of man, could there be any personal condemnation. Jesus pointedly refused to accept such suggestion. So may each one of his followers do.

The spiritual creation, as recorded in the first chapter of Genesis, is complete and perfect. God saw everything that he had made as "very good." In the second chapter, however, it is shown that a mist seemed to envelop the earth, in which man appeared to indulge in a series of dreams and misrepresentations that resulted in his being condemned to till the barren soil of material beliefs in order to support himself and maintain his existence. How unfortunate that this allegory should have been so generally accepted as a statement of true being! Let each one lift up his thought in the glorious light of Jesus' teaching, further illumined by Christian Science, and refute this crushing misapprehension! God made man in His own image and likeness, and man cannot be unmade or remade. He is eternally good and perfect.

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