The seventh commandment

It is typical of all Jesus' teachings that when he was asked which is the great commandment of all he chose not the negative form of the decalogue but the affirmative reading from Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.” The seventh commandment is one at which poor humanity halts and stumbles. But does not the sad failure to comply with the high standard of purity set by Jesus come chiefly from ignorance of what it is to love God and the neighbor? It is certain that purity of heart, chastity of every thought, alone truly keeps this command. Jesus taught that the very evil desires of the heart, unexpressed, break the law. But one is cleansed of these evils in learning the reality of love.

There is an interesting secondary meaning of the word adulterate cited by the Century dictionary, which says that the Latin also means to counterfeit. There is nothing more plainly a counterfeit of the real than that evil passion which human beings sometimes name love. It is of the flesh, true love is of Spirit, God; it is quickly changed to hate, true love is unchangeable; it brings suffering and destruction, true love is endlessly beneficent. To conquer this false belief, however, one has only honestly to recognize that it is a counterfeit, not the thing one really wishes. This takes away its seeming allurement. When human beings are asked to give up any false sense of affection they seem to fear that they are asked to give up love. Yet those who resolutely take the stand expressed by Jesus where he bade one pluck out the offending eye find that they only then begin to know what love really is. Both the false fleshly sense and pure love we cannot have, but it is easily proved in human experience that to choose the pure is to clear the eyes that they may discern the reality of love, the reflection of Love.

In being led away from God by any one of the myriad beliefs of happiness or good that are not good the seventh command is broken. The starting-point of impurity of any kind is in admitting the possibility of some good that is not of God. This is to adulterate our sense of all things, of life and of truth as well as of love, with beliefs of evil. This is to counterfeit reality with what only serves to hide the real, the satisfying, thing which God decrees and governs. God has blessedness and delight for all beyond any dream of present sense, but we shall never reach His realities through the counterfeit.

Human will alone is not, however, enough to conquer any temptation. There must be the active understanding of how to come into oneness with the opposite reality which the seeming evil would counterfeit. Between the final realization of God as Life, Love, Truth, the one creator, the one attraction, and the earthward tending evils that mortals see, stands what Mrs. Eddy describes as the second degree of mortal mind, where evil beliefs are disappearing. (See Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 115.) Here we find the word “affection.” By a growing understanding of divine Love the struggling human heart is lifted above the levels of carnal desires into pure affections. To cry out upon all affection is often to expose persons defenseless to evil passions if they have not yet risen to the knowledge of Love as God. To confound the pure elements of love as it exists in families today with the evil fleshly passion is quite as disastrous as to think that evil passions are God decreed and right. There will be little danger of the incoming of evil to affections when the love of God is truly made the basis of all an individual's concept of good. Mrs. Eddy says of Jesus, “Out of the amplitude of his pure affection, he defined Love” (Science and Health, p. 54).

To center one's strength and happiness in person, rather than in nearness to God, on the other hand, is to make an idol of personality, is to set it, in belief, in the place of God. Human beings sometimes need to have their eyes opened to the mortal selfishness of their sense of love, to let go their clutching hold on limited concepts and even to see themselves bereft of human comradeships. But this is only a temporary condition. The scientific realization that there is never any separation from Love, ever present divine good, will in time begin to demonstrate in the human experience the presence of love and companionship.

There is a sharp dividing line between pure love and the false, and any one willing to discern between them may easily do so. If an affection brings fear, selfishness, jealousy, discomfort, resentment of seeming neglect, it cannot be God-given. True love loves; it does not demand; and God's gifts bring their own peace. An affection which separates one from others or would separate its object from others—a self-seeking affection—is not blessed of God. Much so-called love is mere self-will, the desire to dominate others. People sometimes also imagine that by possessing the person of another they may so possess his goodness. This is a very insidious form of breaking the seventh commandment. One must turn to God as the source of one's good and the giver of one's victory over error.

To admit the need of any human intervention between the heart and God is to surrender the great treasure of spiritual consciousness. This is opened to any man just to the degree that he learns the inviolable direct relation of every child of God to the Father. It is in this sweet silence of inward prayer and communion that God is revealed and spiritual joy dawns. The priceless heritage is obscured and seems lost if one allows another individual to stand between him and his union with divine Love. These things may seem a mystery to material sense, but they are become living reality to those who understand and obey the words of John—read at every Christian Science Sunday service—“Every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”