Article February 20, 1954 Issue

THE IMPERVIOUS ARMOR

MARGARET FLINT JACOBS

"Good thoughts," says Mary Baker Eddy in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 210), "are an impervious armor; clad therewith you are completely shielded from the attacks of error of every sort. And not only yourselves are safe, but all whom your thoughts rest upon are thereby benefited."

These are broad statements and powerful ones; they are comforting, too, assuaging the fears which would intrude upon us. They promise protection, immunity from evil. Believing in their truth, we know that when we seem to suffer any attack of error, there must be some inaccurate or perverted thought to be corrected.

In the New Testament there are instances, recorded facts, of early Christians who were sustained, protected, and delivered through their obedience to the teachings of Christ Jesus. Paul and Silas, when flogged and thrust into prison, as recorded in the sixteenth chapter of Acts, must have been tempted by the despair of fear and doubt, by rebellion against injustice, and by a sense of failure. To all this was added the physical suffering of having their feet held in stocks. Yet Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises to their God. That they could sing was proof that they had lifted their thinking above fear and their apparent material conditions. Their deliverance, which seemed to be a miracle, was the perfectly natural and logical result of their correct thinking and absolute faith in and dependence upon divine law. Their prayers could not have been fearful and desperate pleading; they must have been strong, triumphant declarations of the truths regarding God and man which Christ Jesus had taught and demonstrated. They understood man's freedom and proved it, and in so doing they benefited their fellow prisoners and converted the keeper of the prison to Christianity.

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