Editorial October 22, 1949 Issue

REBUKE RIGHTLY DIRECTED

George Channing

Rebuke is essential in the practice of Christian Science, but it is never employed for the purpose of bringing discomfort or unhappiness to anyone. Rebuke is directed at mortal mind, sin, in its spurious claim to operate as the mind of man and thus usurp the place of God. To mortal mind only belong discomfort and unhappiness. Only to mortal mind, an illusory mentality, can inharmony appear, and then only as an illusion of selfhood.

In the degree that an individual accepts the mesmeric presence of mortal mind as his mind he may seem to experience the discomfort which it experiences. Accordingly, rebuke directed at mortal mind to encompass its destruction aids the demonstration of the individual's separateness from mortal mind and therefore from its discomfort and unhappiness. Hence rebuke, so far as the individual is concerned, is loving, considerate, salutary.

Perhaps no better illustration of this can be cited than the healing by Christ Jesus of what the Bible calls a lunatic child. The narrative states (Matt. 17:18), "And Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the child was cured from that very hour." Clearly, it was not the child who was rebuked, but the devil, that is, the false mentality which Christian Scientists label as mortal mind, or the mind of mortals.

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