Lusting against lust

Generic man, in Christian Science, is the full image and likeness of God, divine Mind, and is reflected in an infinity of greater and lesser ideas and their identities, the sum total of which combine to make up the infinite spiritual idea or generic man. It is thus that Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 258 of Science and Health: “Through spiritual sense you can discern the heart of divinity, and thus begin to comprehend in Science the generic term man. Man is not absorbed in Deity, and man cannot lose his individuality, for he reflects eternal Life; nor is he an isolated, solitary idea for he represents infinite Mind, the sum of all substance.”

Now just as God, good, is counterfeited in devil, evil, so spiritual man is counterfeited in physical man, and all divine ideas and their identities in material ideas and their identities. For instance, Rousseau declares that the greatest enemy of the human race was the man to whom it first occurred to put a ring fence round a piece of ground, and to announce, “This is mine.” Without Truth a lie could not impose itself upon mankind; without spiritual substance there could be no counterfeit material universe. The psalmist understood this when he sang: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein;” and the writer of the wonderful drama of Job understood it, when he caused the Lord to answer out of the whirlwind, in the words: “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail…?” What, of course, Rousseau, in his halting metaphysical way, was striving to imply was that the first person to whom the idea occurred, or the first person at any rate who succumbed to it, that he could inclose a little bit of the earth's surface as his very own, and pin up on the nearest tree a notice to the effect that trespassers would be prosecuted, was the archetype of the spirit of selfishness which was to cause so much trouble in the world. So much, indeed, that century after century man would fight man and nation would contend with nation for possession of this particular expression of the fullness of the Lord.

Rousseau, it need scarcely be said, was far too much of a materialist to see whither his own words were tending, and even the philosophers who followed him, starting from a material basis, lost themselves inevitably in a Sahara of material conclusions. Nor was it until Mrs. Eddy, returning to the spiritual premises of Jesus the Christ, showed mankind the basal error of its philosophic and scientific syllogisms, that the light of the first century began again to penetrate the darkness of material logic. Mrs. Eddy explained to the world what the poetry of the Psalms and the drama of Job really meant, the conclusion toward which the Cyclopean Rousseau was merely groping round his cave. She showed that the first landowner had created not merely a land or an economic question, but had attempted to corral a portion of the fullness of divine Principle; in short, that he was attempting to establish a self apart from God, and that in so doing he was merely engaged in reiterating, all unconsciously, the words of that wonderful letter to the “foolish Galatians,” “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”

The term lust is, indeed, one of those words which have unfortunately been narrowed down in their meaning to a specific phase of sensuality. Yet it really covers the whole gamut of the desires of the senses, and this is shown by the fact that the translators of the Old Testament used it as an alternative to soul in their renderings of the Hebrew word, nephesh, itself instinct with the very incarnation of animal propensity. In English the word originally meant sensuous pleasure, and so came to mean action or desire of a vehement or even inordinate nature. And thus the vehemence of Spirit’s battle with the flesh has merged itself into the flesh’s inordinate desire for the gratification of its sexual appetite, for the simple reason that this particular appetite sums up the whole of the lusts of the flesh, inasmuch as it is the expression of the human mind's method of perpetuating animal birth upon the planet. From this it becomes easily cognizable that birth and death constitute the opposite ends of the very finite stick known as human life, and how fear is, in consequence, the very expression of this belief of life and death. The belief in an end necessitates the belief in a beginning, and it is impossible to separate the one from the other. Inordinate desire, then, or lust, is fear, since it is the expression of the human mind's effort to perpetuate the evidence of its own being, combined with its terror of extinction. This, therefore, is why it contains all the seeds of disease, and why healing must, as a consequence, always be a process of mental purification. And so Mrs. Eddy has written on page 411 of Science and Health: “Always begin your treatment by allaying the fear of patients.”

This allaying the fear of patients is, in scientific terms, what the Bible means by acquiring a clean heart, a pure heart, or a new heart. It is the destruction, through the lusting of Spirit against the flesh, of the old theological belief that the image and likeness of God, Spirit, is a human being, and the recognition instead, of the fact that this human being is the counterfeit of the real man, the image and likeness of God. The writer of the fourth gospel put this with surprising clarity when he explained that spiritual man was born “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God;” and again when he insisted, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” There is no transition, that is to say, from the flesh to Spirit. The human sense of a man is a material misconception of man, who is a divine idea, reflecting the character of the divine Mind, and born “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” It was Jesus’ perpetual lusting against the will of the flesh that gradually destroyed his vision of the flesh, through his vision of the real man or the Christ. It was Mrs. Eddy’s vision of the Christ that showed her the secret of Jesus’ teaching, and taught her how to write, on page 476 of Science and Health: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick.”