Editorial January 13, 1973 Issue

Spiritual Understanding Cuts Red Tape

Naomi Price

Permits, licenses, affidavits, forms in triplicate: few of us are exempt from them. They are human devices intended to assist in the administration of law and the maintenance of order and should be looked upon as friends—and they are friends if they operate under the government of divine intelligence. But too often we seem to have cause to think of them as enemies, frustrations symbolized by red tape entangling us in webs of legal formality, preventing us from doing things that are reasonable for us to do, and from possessing things we really ought to have.

Frustration such as this is not a phenomenon only of twentieth century bureaucracy. It is a product of the timeless maneuver of evil, or mortal mind, operating through the administration of various forms of human law to claim that God's law of harmony can be set aside and the fulfillment of His will be prevented. If it had been able, this form of animal magnetism would have hindered even Christ Jesus in his demonstration of God's healing love. At one time, for example, through the rigid interpretation of ecclesiastical law, it would have stopped him from healing a paralyzed man on the Sabbath day.

But, speaking of the law of Moses, the Master said, "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil."^{Matt. 5:17;} Nothing could stop him fulfilling his God-given mission to demonstrate the perfection of man. The red tape of Caesar's law, the literal interpretation of the Mosaic commands, the belief that physical laws of hygiene govern a man's health—none of these could frustrate the operation of divine law as he practiced it. He proved the superiority of spiritual over erring physical law, silenced the arguments of learned doctors of theology and medicine with divine wisdom, and healed paralysis, dementia, leprosy, in opposition to supposed material law. Mrs. Eddy writes, "If his patient was a theologian of some bigoted sect, a physician, or a professor of natural philosophy,—according to the ruder sort then prevalent,—he never thanked Jesus for restoring his senseless hand; but neither red tape nor indignity hindered the divine process."^{Unity of Good, p. 11.}