Article September 8, 1951 Issue

DIVINE LAW AND ORDER

CHARLES EDWARD ARNOLD

Christian Science brings the happy assurance that divine harmony and perfection are the ever-present and essential verities of God's creation, and that this harmony and perfection is perpetually maintained in obedience to unchanging spiritual law; that, as certainly as there is a created universe, just as surely is there a perfect law which governs it in exact order and according to unchanging divine purpose. The general tendency of the human mind to doubt or to dispute this statement of fact obtains only because a mutable and material creation or concept is being mistaken for God's creation, and because a chaotic, unpredictable misrule is being accepted as the divine government. Human theories interpret from an erroneous material basis; looking no farther than the limitations of mortality, they mistake the unreal for the real, error for truth, and the symbol for the substance.

Even the remarkable precision and order of the sensuous universe, its beauty of landscape and flower, its grandeur of ocean and sky, are not absolutely beautiful, but only relatively so because they are marred by the false belief in the reality of matter. Absolute beauty, perfect law and order, exist only in the realm of Spirit, God, to be discerned through spiritualized and purified consciousness.

Divine metaphysics is founded on Jesus' definition of God as Spirit. It rejects all physical sense of Deity and of His creation and thus corrects the mistaken sense of law and order and reveals divine perfection. Mary Baker Eddy, the revelator of Christian Science, says on page 123 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," "Divine Science, rising above physical theories, excludes matter, resolves things into thoughts, and replaces the objects of material sense with spiritual ideas." Thus the thought of a sensuous universe and constant misrule is replaced with the spiritual idea of a universe of Spirit governed by unchanging law, which is perpetually active and harmonious.