If one were brought to trial for breaking a law which did not exist, he could obtain his freedom by making the right kind of protest. This protest would be more than a mere plea of not guilty; it would show the nonexistence of the law.

Christ Jesus understood the law of God. He healed disease according to this law. When someone was ill, Jesus did not accept the illness as God-sent. His plea, therefore, was not to God in the hope that God would set aside His law. When his disciples suggested that a man had been born blind because he or his parents had sinned, Jesus said, "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him" (John 9:3) And he healed him.

In this instance Jesus did not have to free the man from sin. He was not blind because of a law which he had broken. He was blind because of a law of mortal mind—the so-called law that says man is a mortal and must express the conditions of matter. In Christian Science we learn that this law does not exist.

Mortal mind says that each of us is here as a result of material circumstances. It claims that discord, disease, and death are normal conditions, and it threatens with punishment for having broken or lived outside the law of matter anyone who is living a harmonious life, who is in good health, or, for that matter, who is alive. The blind man was blind because of this false, unjust law, and the Master knew it. He knew also that God is the only lawgiver and that material law is but an illusion. Because of this understanding, his protest was valid and effective. The man’s eyes were opened.

God's law demands of us that we be honest in doing the best we know how to do today in expressing the qualities of our Father-Mother God. God is Spirit, and man is His spiritual idea. As we behold the real man, and identify ourselves with God by expressing the qualities of true manhood, we are overcoming sin and death.

Sin is the belief in personal existence apart from God, in material consciousness, material pains, and material pleasures. But God and His spiritual idea are the all of existence, and this truth brings punishment to sin and to anyone who identifies himself with sin. Actually, the punishment is self-inflicted for it is merely the agony of sin's self-destruction as it is being exposed to the truth and as its nothingness is becoming evident. As one stops believing in sin as a reality, he separates himself from sin, ceases to be a sinner, and enjoys his spiritual identity in God's perfect image.

One who is honestly doing all he knows how to do to overcome sin can overcome disease by applying the truth. On page 384 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy writes, "We should relieve our minds from the depressing thought that we have transgressed a material law and must of necessity pay the penalty." And farther on she says, "If man seems to incur the penalty through matter, this is but a belief of mortal mind, not an enactment of wisdom, and man has only to enter his protest against this belief in order to annul it."

Chance, heredity, contagion, accident, diet, the dependence of organs on temperatures, atmospheric conditions, and so on, are not laws made by God. They are sinful thoughts projected by the carnal, or mortal, mind.

If one has a sinful thought, and knows it, he must work faithfully to overcome it. If one has a sinful thought and does not know it, his earnest desire to know himself and to purify his thought will lead him to see the error and its falsity. Then he can discard it. But as long as one is emerging as rapidly as he knows how to emerge from a material sense of being, he will find himself fully qualified to protest any diseased condition on the ground that there is no law of matter.

If one finds that his protest against a disease is ineffective, he may need to ask himself if he is entering his protest on the basis of understood Truth or merely in the hope that by much protesting he can change a material condition. He may also need to ask himself whether he is doing his best to obey the commandments and to practice the virtues explained by Christ Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount.

If, for example, one is not consistently casting the beam out of his own eye before attempting mentally to criticize his brother or if he is not expressing genuine love for his enemies, he is to that extent living in disobedience to the law of God. And it is on the basis of the law of God, the law of Love, that one can protest the law of matter, which is the law of discord, disease, and death.

We shall increase the effectiveness of our protests—in other words, the effectiveness of our healing work—as we learn to understand that there actually is no law to make a man sick and as we free ourselves from sin's self-punishment by living in obedience to the laws of God.

Carl J. Welz