Christ Jesus had a trenchant way of stating his thoughts, and an impressive originality in his form of expression. Incisively he presented his ideas with a rare economy of words, but with great depth of meaning.

To the seventy who had just returned from their successful healing mission he stated in graphic phrase what had been taking place in his thought. Let us weigh his words: "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10: 18). Although the physical explanation of lightning was not then known, Jesus' hearers well knew the almost instantaneousness with which lightning bolts fell from the heavens.

The Master used this simile to picture the complete separateness of Satan—all evil—from the all-ness of God, which the Christ-idea had revealed to his consciousness. The same thought of evil's complete unrelatedness to Truth's creation, or God's heaven, was voiced by Jesus' trusted disciple, John, in Revelation, thus: "Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven" (Rev. 12:7, 8).

Jesus and John saw, and wished others to see, that the one evil, so-called mortal mind, with all its material misconceptions of creation and man, is unable to establish any relatedness to or occupy any place in the harmonious universe of divine Mind's evolving. This most important verity Christian Science is helping its students to perceive and progressively to demonstrate. Says Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 569), "Every mortal at some period, here or hereafter, must grapple with and overcome the mortal belief in a power opposed to God."

Following his statement quoted above, the Master told his hearers what Satan's fall from heaven—evil's unrelatedness to God and man—meant to them individually in their everyday experience, namely, immunity from and superiority to all evil. Said he: "I give unto you power ... over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you" (Luke 10:19).

Have you been tempted to believe that you are a hurt mortal, that an accident or injury has hurt you physically, resulting in bad effects; that you have been mentally hurt by the unkindness, criticism, or hate of another; that some other mortal has hurt your chances for merited recognition, promotion, and successful accomplishment? Or perhaps some other phase of hurt tempts you to believe it is riveted on your thought and experience. But the Master's statement stands, "Nothing shall by any means hurt you."

He of course was referring to the one true Life, consciousness, and identity of man, our spiritual individuality, God's son, which does not exist to be the object or target of the would-be hurtful influences of the destructive mortal mind. This only true being of every individual exists to manifest, glorify, and demonstrate the Mind, Life, and substance which is God, and to do so forever. In this same talk to the seventy Jesus also said, "Rejoice, because your names are written in heaven"—because the only real nature and selfhood of man is naturally and eternally included in the harmonious, exempt-from-evil kingdom, where positive intelligence constantly reigns supreme over every expression of Life.

Never has there been an accident or injury in God's kingdom to hurt a single one of His ideas. Never have there been any conflicting forces with man as their victim. Let us know and rejoice in this eternal intactness of God's work. So never can error make good its claim to involve man in an accident or injury to which it attaches a sequence of bad effects. What was never caused by the only cause or never known to the all-knowing Mind, or any of its ideas, in the first instance, could produce no aftereffects on the God-constituted integrity and wholeness of man in the second instance. Satan's lack of place in God's heaven, Truth's creation, has always been a scientific fact. Eternally, there is no place in Love's infinitude for satanic evil in any of its modes.

So the lying carnal mind and its motley horde of materially-minded mortals—Satan's fictitious family—have never had place in Spirit's universe, man's home and heaven. Never has there been a hurt or a hurtable mortal in infinite Mind, and there is none there now. If you are believing otherwise, it is only because you are believing in and mentally looking at a mistaken concept of creation—mortal mind's claim to expression. Turn to the Christ-idea of God as the infinite and only cause, and man, collectively and individually, as God's reflection, and you will find no mortal mind, no hurt-producing forces, no wrong-thinking mortals, some conniving to hurt and some believing they are hurt.

From whence come such phenomena? Certainly not from God. It is all of mortal mind's supposing and of mortals' believing. Our work is, through understanding prayer, to realize the individual and collective oneness of man with God and man's consequent eternal separateness from evil, from all that would claim by any means, physical or mental, to impair, injure, hurt, or destroy.

"A courtier," writes Mrs. Eddy, "told Constantine that a mob had broken the head of his statue with stones. The emperor lifted his hands to his head, saying: 'It is very surprising, but I don't feel hurt in the least'" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 224). Not so surprising either! The stones were aimed at what was not Constantine. So the evil mind aims its stones—its destructive thoughts and forces—only at its own misconceptions, using its own suppositional forces or agents for doing so.

How separate and far away all this is from the universe of God, man's present and eternal habitation. Remember then and realize that there is no hurt mortal and no mortal doing hurt in the kingdom of our Father, and that His Christ, the spiritual idea of Life, enables you and me to demonstrate this.

Paul Stark Seeley