Christ Jesus said of heaven, "It is God's throne" (Matt. 5:34). Because throne denotes sovereignty, one should think of heaven in terms of God's authority and of His government in terms of His just and merciful law. In Christian Science one learns that to achieve salvation from the mortal sense of life, with its pains and sorrows and sins, one must find his place in heaven through obedience to divine law. In fact, one is in heaven now in the measure of his obedience to that law. Because one does not die in order to be thus obedient, one does not die in order to enter heaven.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus linked heaven with obedience when he said of the Ten Commandments (verse 19), "Whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." This greatest of all sermons is a profound dissertation on law; it sets forth the essence of God's law, the spirit in which it must be obeyed if heaven is to be attained. The Master was always in heaven because on no occasion did he fail to obey divine law. He understood God's law in all its truth and might, and he demonstrated its full control of his life.

In our age, Mary Baker Eddy lifted the understanding of law to its absolute meaning when she discovered Christian Science, for this Science is veritable law, the spiritual force by which. God, Spirit, expresses Himself. Law, to be actual, must be a force, energy, or power that acts constantly to produce effect. Divine law cannot be broken, because it is God's will, the constant purposeful energy of divine Mind, which acts to create, perpetuate, and control the realm of reality— the kingdom of heaven.

The function of law is to govern, and one must realize that some force, either good or bad, is governing every thought he entertains, every action he manifests, every incident taking place in his environment. The whole purpose of Christian Science is to demonstrate God's law, that is, one must bring all thought and action into conformity with the divine will by understanding it to be the only will. Then whatever contradicts God's will is proved lawless and powerless, in fact, nonexistent.

Spiritually truthful thinking demonstrates God's government and man's scientific status in His realm. This government is seen in the merciful healings which take place through Christian Science. With each healing, heaven comes more clearly to view, and God is better understood as the governor of all.

In order to demonstrate the constant control of divine law, one needs to yield to its presence and to understand it so clearly as the perpetually active energy of Mind that no evil power, so called, will be able to control him. A quality of God has the energy of Mind, which the ideas of Mind embody. In the real man, God's image and likeness, such qualities as justice, love, joy, purity, and health are continuously operating, and nothing can lessen their vigor or stop their action. No quality of God can be removed from man's character or become inactive in it. God's man is invariably controlled by the law of love, the law of health, the law of purity—the energies that constitute his perfection. God enforces His laws, and His government constitutes the heaven in which His ideas live and act forever.

Mrs. Eddy gives us this scientific description of man in "No and Yes" (p. 11): "Man has perpetual individuality; and God's laws, and their intelligent and harmonious action, constitute his individuality in the Science of Soul." If an individual seems to have wandered from this scientific concept of manhood, his disobedience to law must be reckoned as illusion and destroyed on that basis. An idea cannot break away from the control of the Mind whose knowing gives it existence. The logic of this control is undeniable; and working it out by willingly exercising such qualities as intelligence, wisdom, and goodness, one awakens to his real life in Mind.

Jesus proved that all the supposed forces of evil, which would have obstructed his mission and crushed out the life that was to exemplify real manhood for all time to come, were powerless in the presence of his humble obedience to the Father's will. So consistently operative were the spiritual forces of Spirit in his consciousness that they gave proof of his unseverable unity with the one Mind to whose government he bore witness.

There was nothing abstract or theoretical in the Master's precepts concerning heaven and man's place in it. Jesus was not content with idealistic statements concerning this glorious realm. He demanded that the truth of God and man be lived. He said (Luke 17: 20,21), "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." And Mrs. Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 343), "Thought must be made better, and human life more fruitful, for the divine energy to move it onward and upward."

Mankind come into the presence of God's throne when they demonstrate His will in all Christliness. Heaven is then no far-off place, nor is it a vague mental state. It is found in the consciousness that expresses the power and the glory of Mind, which not only makes man perfect but maintains his obedience to divine law throughout eternity.

Helen Wood Bauman