Article September 19, 1959 Issue

A LAW TO ONESELF

L. IVIMY GWALTER

With tender insight of the needs of her followers and with superb wisdom, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 442), "Christian Scientists, be a law to yourselves that mental malpractice cannot harm you either when asleep or when awake." So important did Mrs. Eddy deem this admonition that in her book "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany," she twice calls the attention of her followers thereto, exhorting them to give it daily heed (see pp. 236 and 237).

The questions then arise, How may we be a law to ourselves? And, What kind of a law shall it be? One of the first things the student of Christian Science learns is that the power his new-found understanding of God confers upon him can never be used from selfish motives or for sordid purposes. Our great Exemplar, Christ Jesus, proved this as an object lesson for humanity when at the outset of his glorious ministry he thrice rebuked and overcame the aggressive suggestions of evil, which would have perverted his motives and extinguished his demonstration of the Christ.

It is a significant warning that the temptation described in the opening verses of the fourth chapter of Matthew's Gospel followed hard upon Jesus' exalted sense of the divinity of his mission which ends the preceding chapter. The truth he demonstrated in this moral victory was the truth which later enabled him to face the fury of the Pharisees, to walk unseen through the angry mob, to speak with authority, to feed the multitude, and to still the storm.

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