Editorial January 19, 1946 Issue

The Law and the Prophets

Margaret Morrison

In the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy are set forth the monotheistic doctrine and the law of Israel. In the fourth and fifth verses we read. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." The commands that follow this pronouncement show the importance attached to it by the great lawgiver. Those words were to be kept in the heart and to be dwelt upon continually; they were to be taught diligently to the children. They were to be written upon the posts of the house and upon the gates and to be for all the rule of conduct. And the fear of or honor due the one God was never to be forgotten. Such was the law. When asked why these commands were so imperative, the answer related the goodness and power of the Lord shown in bringing these people up out of Egypt out of the house of bondage into the land of freedom and promise.

The continued unfoldment of this law is shown in the words and works of the prophets who obeyed the law, and whose lives proved the power of their living faith in God. A prophet of this age, Mary Baker Eddy, on page 593 of the Glossary of the Christian Science textbook. "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," has given this arresting definition: "Prophet. A spiritual seer; disappearance of material sense before the conscious facts of spiritual Truth." A prophet then is not in truth a mortal person, but a purified state of consciousness in which material sense is disappearing before "the conscious facts of spiritual Truth." The development of this purified state of consciousness may be followed through the record of the lives of the prophets from Moses to the great Galilean Prophet, Christ Jesus, who represented "the conscious facts of spiritual Truth" in their clarity and fullness of power.

Of the Galilean Prophet, Mrs. Eddy says on page 288 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany": "His piety partook not of the travesties of human opinions, pagan mysticisms, tribal religion, Greek philosophy, creed, dogma, or materia medica. The divine Mind was his only instrumentality in religion or medicine. The so-called laws of matter he eschewed: with him matter was not the auxiliary of Spirit. He never appealed to matter to perform the functions of Spirit, divine Love." Jesus had fulfilled the law of Moses from his youth, and in the fullness of the revelation of spiritual facts had superseded the law with the grace and truth of the Christ. Thus he gave the second commandment, which was like unto the first, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." And he said that "on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Here we have the law, and the grace of Spirit which fulfills the law.

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