Editorial September 23, 1961 Issue

"The original standard"

Helen Wood Bauman

The standards of mankind are reflected in their arts, their sciences, their mores, their religious worship. Standards change from generation to generation, and wise is the individual who sees to it that his standards improve upon rather than fall below those of his predecessors.

Moses set the moral standard for humanity when he established the Ten Commandments as law. These are not arbitrary rules for human conduct outlined by a single individual; they typify the divine order of being, in which man, made in God's spiritual likeness, loves his Maker supremely and his fellow man as himself. No doubt the Ten Commandments set forth the highest expression of the divine order of existence that men of that period were capable of grasping.

Christ Jesus showed mankind how to attain a higher realization of the divine order when he gave them the Sermon on the Mount and his "new commandment" (John 13:34): "That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." The Master taught men to fulfill the moral law through love rather than ritualistically. As Mary Baker Eddy explains in "Miscellaneous writings" (p. 261), "Jesus said, 'I came not to destroy the law,'—the divine requirements typified in the law of Moses, —'but to fulfil it' in righteousness, by Truth's destroying error."

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