Editorial March 12, 1955 Issue

RESISTING TEMPTATION

Helen Wood Bauman

The Bible declares that Christ Jesus "was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (Hebr. 4:15). This fact comforts mankind but little unless they avail themselves of the same God-given ability to resist evil temptation that the Master utilized. In the wilderness Jesus grappled with the fundamental errors of the so-called carnal mind, the instincts which appear to be the inheritance of all men: the beliefs of life, substance, and intelligence in matter (see Matt. 4: 1—11). His defense was in God, and it was in terms of the truth gleaned from the Scriptures that he met and destroyed the suggestions that life is vested in flesh and dependent upon matter, that matter can destroy life, and that an abundance of matter, rather than the activity of intelligence, is substance.

When these carnal instincts are subordinated to the facts of Spirit's allness and man's existence in God as Spirit's expression, temptations either to err or to be ill are more readily resisted and overcome. Mankind often struggle with evil suggestions on a personal basis while neglecting to handle the fundamental errors in which all human sins and sicknesses are rooted. Although Christian Science exposes evil's ways, it at the same time declares mortal mind's nothingness and unfolds the way to free oneself from its temptations.

On pages 379 and 380 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy shows that in belief disease impresses thought when the false sense of mind in matter has not been destroyed. She takes a fever case as an illustration, first explaining that symptoms of fever are only mental pictures drawn on the body by mortal thought. Then she says, "Unless the fever-picture, drawn by millions of mortals and imaged on the body through the belief that mind is in matter and discord is as real as harmony, is destroyed through Science, it may rest at length on some receptive thought, and become a fever case, which ends in a belief called death, which belief must be finally conquered by eternal Life." She continues, "Truth is always the victor."

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