Article July 23, 1955 Issue

GAINING AN AFFECTION FOR GOOD

WILLIAM MILFORD CORRELL

It has long been the worldly point of view that to be religious or good deprives one of some desirable experience or causes one to miss something in life. Material thinking, in arguing for a "broad" experience, has repeatedly presented the temptation of the serpent (Gen. 3:5), "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Christian Science has thoroughly uncovered this lie by showing the injurious and joy-depriving effects of knowing evil in any form, and the satisfying fulfillment of knowing the allness of God, good.

Part of negative thinking stems from the concept of religion as an objective or limiting law controlling the people by outside authority or ecclesiastical priesthood. But as Christian Science unfolds God to us as divine Principle, we understand the promise recorded in Jeremiah (31:31-33): "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: ... after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people."

Here we see that all real control is actually self-control under Principle. Man obeys as an idea obeying the Mind which conceives it. The law of God is indeed in man's "inward parts," for man is the reflection, the image and likeness, of God, Spirit. Christ Jesus voiced the highest standard of obedience to God in the Sermon on the Mount and declared the greatest of all commandments to be (Matt. 22: 37): "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind."

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