Editorial August 6, 1960 Issue

The Need of Obedience

Helen Wood Bauman

Every true Christian recognizes that he must be obedient to God's law if he is to attain salvation and inherit the kingdom of heaven. Christian Science insists that one is in heaven now in the measure that he obeys its laws. The fact is that man—and heaven too— has appeared only as divine law has been revealed, for according to the Science of Christianity, man is spiritual, made in God's likeness, and he is invariably obedient to the Father's will. In God's realm, man cannot disobey divine law, for it is fully enforced by the one Lawgiver, divine Mind.

Moses presented God's law in the form of rules for human behavior, which would bring the thinking of mankind into conformity with the truth of real manhood, wherein man loves God supremely and his fellow man as himself. The Ten Commandments were rules for moral conduct, designed to teach a primitive people the difference between right and wrong, obedience to God's will and disobedience to it. And in succeeding ages they have never lost their purpose for humanity.

Christ Jesus lifted mankind's concept of God's law higher when he revealed its motivation to be the love that demonstrates Love's power. He gave the Christian law when he said (John 13:34), "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." In the Sermon on the Mount, the Master also provided mankind with rules for human behavior. But this he did on a basis more profoundly metaphysical than the one Moses had demanded. For men were to obey the Commandments in their mental and spiritual essence—in thought, in the spirit of Truth, which can never deteriorate into ritualism.

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