JEALOUSY OVERCOME BY DEVOTION

JEANETTE F. SUTTON

In the second commandment, it will be recalled, God is represented as declaring (Ex. 20:5), "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God." Referring to this Biblical passage, one woman remarked to another that she considered it strange that the word "jealous" should be used in describing the nature of God. Whereupon the speaker's young son, who had overheard the remark, said, "Why, Mother, that just means that God doesn't allow us to worship anything but Him."

The mother was grateful for the clear thought of the boy, who was a pupil in the Christian Science Sunday School. Later she looked up the word "jealous" in a dictionary and found that one definition given was "exacting exclusive devotion." Exclusive devotion, she reasoned, is a divine demand, not a human.

Man, the complete expression of God, possesses spiritual qualities, such as unselfishness, intelligence, purity, charity, mercy, and good will, and he ceaselessly manifests these qualities. Jealousy is not a natural trait of man, the image of God, divine Love, but a falsity of the so-called carnal mind. Being wholly evil, it does not have its source in God, good, and therefore has no cause or effect, no reality, law, power, or intelligence. Hence jealousy never touches man's spiritual identity.

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