Article September 2, 1944 Issue

The Samaritan Quality

NEIL MARTIN

The man who above all others has understood and expressed God as Love could yet be moved to chide error when he saw it manifested in the life about him. Jesus' most withering rebukes were for the Pharisaical thought sometimes latent in human nature, the tendency of which is to pay heed to the letter rather than the spirit of the law, to value good words more than good works, to "strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel."

In our day, as in Jesus' time, this kind of thinking characterizes those individuals who "love the uppermost rooms at feasts," as St. Matthew records it, that is, who jealously strive to maintain or ruthlessly seek to achieve special privilege; those persons who obey the written law but who have omitted the "weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith;" such as "make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess."

Now Christian Scientists are followers of the Master's teaching, and seek to apply it in deed and in truth. That teaching has been made clear and ever available in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy. The kind of thinking which the Master rebuked she also rebuked. She realized that only through individual enlightenment and demonstration can there be final salvation and peace for mankind. To heal the world's errors, and to correct its injustices, we must begin not with others but with ourselves. We must search our own thinking, and bring to the surface for readier destruction that subtle and deceiving error which is the root of all errors, the belief that there is power or intelligence apart from the divine power, the universal, omnipresent Mind, God.

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