Editorial July 8, 1950 Issue

NOT GUILTY

George Channing

Man is never visited with penalty for guilt, and he never entertains a sense of guilt. This is true because man never breaks law. That statement is, in turn, true because God, whose expression of Himself is man, never breaks law. This liberating truth not only is urgently needed by mankind, but is happily within the grasp of everyone today through the ministry of Christian Science. The sense of guilt is a dissipater of energy, an underminer of enthusiasm, confidence, courage, and health. Since it does not belong to man, every individual should be progressively proving himself to be man, and therefore endowed with unimpaired ability to act in the freedom of his guiltless status.

Guilt belongs only to mortal mind. It is inherent in mortal mind's dream of existence, for the dream denies the exclusive existence of divine Mind, God. Mortal mind is therefore a supposititious usurper of God's infinite realm of reality. Hence the individual who adopts mortal mind as his mind faces the situation to which Paul alludes when referring to what Christian Science explains as a false sense of life in matter (I Cor. 15: 19): "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable."

In other words, by the adoption of mortal mind we are weighed down with a sense of guilt, which is the procurer of fear, shame, incompetence, and disease, and from which there is no escape by way of begging God's mercy upon sinful sense. Escape is not necessary. There is need only for awakening to man's eternally innocent status, achieved by repudiating sinful sense and demonstrating for oneself that divine and perfect Mind is the Mind of man.

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