Article November 7, 1942 Issue

The Commandments: Passports to Power

[Of Special Interest to Youth]

ELIZABETH WOOLLEY

Today the most popular books in a big circulating library are the "How to do it" books. We are interested in less leaning and more learning. Ten lessons on how to accomplish something very important were once put together and called the Commandments. They may have been buried in successive waves of materialism, but because they are fundamental in Principle and practice they can never be superseded or set aside. You and I are moving in momentous times. Whether we are in school, college, in an office, or working on an assembly line, we are conscious that devastating forces are attempting to command our attention, to enslave and destroy free people.

Naturally we want to do something about it. Are we aware that, sweeping down the centuries, Spirit, the opposite of material force, has so commanded the attention of certain men and women that they have lifted their nation into liberty? These people were heroic. Some of them we read about in the Bible, but they are not just Bible characters or names in literature. They were ordinary people like you and me. The thing that distinguished them was Spirit, their God. Day by day they gave their allegiance to Spirit. This put them within the sphere of divine law, where evil is not formidable because it is too small, and success in good is irresistible because good is infinite.

If we give mathematics our allegiance day by day, we become mathematicians and can do large problems without having to count on our fingers. Some people who might see us calculating stresses and strains for a bridge would say, "Why, that's miraculous!" But is it? More than likely it would have been the result of fidelity in sticking to the rules, correcting mistakes, applying original thought to the problem. You and I who have glimpsed the possibilities of applying Christian Science, the law of God, are also required to give our obedience to something more potent than materialism, which is a state of drift not a state of thought. It is shortsighted not to be familiar with the great power that frees human beings from their failures. It is even more shortsighted to know that the power exists and not obey its law. We, too, are in a position to change history and to change it for the better. Let us look across what is called history at a situation that parallels our own times.

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