Editorial August 12, 1996 Issue

"Thou shalt not steal"

Barbara M. Vining

My mother, in her quiet way, once told me something that I have since come to think of as "my mother's rule for guarding my moral integrity." She said: "If you wouldn't want people to know you are doing it, don't do it." This gave me a yardstick for measuring the Rightness or wrongness of something I was tempted to do—before I did it. If I knew I wouldn't be happy to have someone catch me at it, I knew it was wrong, and I wouldn't do it.

Stealing is something that obviously fits into the category of not wanting people to know what you are doing; it's usually done secretly, with the hope of never being found out. I don't recall exactly when mother gave me this advice, though I do know it was sometime after a couple of instances when I had sneaked into her bedroom and taken something from her purse. She never mentioned those instances specifically, but I can't remember stealing anything after that. It was clear to me that stealing was wrong, and I had no desire to do what I knew was wrong. I wanted to do what was right—the kind of thing I would be happy to know that I had done, and that I would be happy to have others know about. That made stealing out of the question for me, because it would rob me of my moral integrity.

Moral integrity, I've since come to realize, is the carrying out in human experience of our spiritual integrity—our wholeness, or completeness, as God's spiritual idea, the reflection of His being. The Preacher in the book of Ecclesiastes says, "I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it" (3:14). In the same way that nothing can be added to or taken from God, the infinite divine Mind, nothing can be added to or taken from man, Mind's infinite idea, or manifestation. To believe that we can gain something by stealing property, ideas, or rights from someone else is to believe that we are limited mortals, competing with other mortals for limited resources. This belief can never get beyond its own insufficiency; and the act of stealing only prolongs our enslavement to lack. But we are actually God's immortal spiritual reflection, man, who, as Mary Baker Eddy explains in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, is "the compound idea of God, including all right ideas ..." (p. 475).