Article November 3, 1951 Issue

SPIRITUAL RESPONSIBILITY

H. PHELPS GATES

In your daily experience are you inclined to make others responsible for your troubles? When a problem confronts you, do you look for something or someone other than yourself to blame? Seeking out a person, thing, or condition on which to unload blame is sometimes called looking for a scapegoat, and it is nothing new to mortal mind.

The ancient practice of placing all the sins on a goat and banishing it to the wilderness is described in Leviticus (16:10): "The goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness." It was a twice-a-year ritual in Japan to place the impurities of the people on a horse, to be washed away in the sea. The ancient Romans and Greeks similarly sought to transfer their guilt to a human victim, who was thrown into the sea or otherwise destroyed.

Christian Science, which reveals man's wholeness and perfection as the reflection of God, leaves no opportunity for alibis, for blaming others for one's own problems, or for ritualistic scapegoats. To blame sickness, sin, or inharmony of any sort upon a person, place, or condition over which the sufferer has no control is to admit that there is a power apart from God and that man is not in his eternal state of perfection and dominion as God's expression.

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