Article September 27, 1947 Issue

"WHO IS THINE ENEMY?"

LUCY MAY ROSAMOND

The world is filled with innumerable people who believe that they have one or more personal enemies, and that they themselves dislike many persons. This distressing condition has often created a sense of resentment or malice, or a desire for retaliation, thus causing otherwise happy hearts to be perplexed and troubled. There is no more destructive error to be encountered than hate. The one who harbors it cannot hope to escape becoming the victim of his own wrong thoughts. Hannah More said, "If I wished to punish my enemy, I should make him hate somebody."

In "Miscellaneous Writings" our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, asks us (p. 8): "Who is thine enemy that thou shouldst love him? Is it a creature or a thing outside thine own creation?" And her answer includes the following: "Simply count your enemy to be that which defiles, defaces, and dethrones the Christ-image that you should reflect." Our primary concern, then, should be not what our brother thinks of us, but what we think of our brother. Have we aught against him? Do we believe that he is dishonest, untruthful, quarrelsome, greedy, selfish, hateful, and insincere? These errors are all mortal and erring illusions and not the realities of being. There is only one creative Principle, God, and He never made evil and imparted it to His creation. "Man is the expression of God's being," our Leader tells us on page 470 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." Any other concept of man is false and deceptive.

Real creation consists of God's ideas as they exist in the realm of Spirit. It matters not what the so-called personal senses tell us about our brother. These senses always bear false witness against man, for their testimony is entirely dependent on what mortals do or believe. Only as we impersonalize evil, thus seeing it as nothing, no one, and nowhere, do we destroy its seeming presence and activity.

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