The human mind, having no knowledge of Principle, has no positive criterion by means of which it can scientifically separate good from evil. It is, in other words, ignorant of law, and so is incapable of judging righteous judgment. Thus it separates the tares from the wheat by human decisions which it terms moral or state laws, but which are proved not to be law by the exceedingly simple fact that they change or vary from decade to decade, or as frontiers are crossed. Three and a half centuries ago men and women were being burned as heretics in England; a couple of centuries ago witches were being hanged in Salem. To-day polygamy is legal and customary in the East, but in the West indulgence in it makes a man a criminal. What is it then that separates the reign of "Bloody" Mary from that of George V, or the Massachusetts of William of Orange from that of Woodrow Wilson? Principle has not changed, law cannot change, God remains God. The difference, then, is simple but subtle. It is that men have learned in a measure that liberty is not license, and are learning, however unwillingly, the further lesson that where there is license there is no liberty. In a word, that license is slavery.

In the twilight of history, when Romulus and Remus were supposed to have been suckled by a wolf, and when the human being was actually little better than the brute, license was practically regarded as a synonym for liberty. What separated Cæsar, in his great palace on the Palatine, from the coppersmiths and cobblers, hammering and sewing in the dark little shops round the Forum, was the ability of the one to do as he pleased, and the necessity of the others to do as they were bidden. The gulf between Herod, building his great pleasure house at Capernaum, and the fishermen, straining at their oars out on the great lake, or the shepherds watching their sheep under the stars on the hills of Judah, was the opportunity of the first to gratify without restriction his sensual appetites, and the compulsion of the others to eat the bread and drink the water of poverty and toil. Pilate put the whole position, in all its naked selfishness and brutality, to Jesus, when he demanded, with half angry, half surprised curiosity, "Knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee?" and was rendered speechless by Jesus' reply, which he could not confute, and yet did not in the least understand, "Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above."

Behind those words, so mystical to the sensual tyrant, lay the simple statement of scientific Christianity, of Truth, the statement that real power and consequently liberty, was summed up in the laying down of license, and in the consequent realization of the liberty of the sons of God. "The likeness of God," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 315 of Science and Health, "we lose sight of through sin, which beclouds the spiritual sense of Truth; and we realize this likeness only when we subdue sin and prove man's heritage, the liberty of the sons of God" This realization was first achieved no matter in how slight a degree, and this proof, no matter how feebly, was first given, by the patriarch Abraham. And for the purpose of the Bible, the purpose of illustration, it matters nothing at all whether Abraham was merely the type of the friend of God, or whether he was the first human being who made himself the friend of God, or obedient to Principle, in a degree sufficient to enable him to walk so far, at any rate, with God, as to put aside, in a measure, his self-will or love of license, and so gain that freedom from the flesh which is the only true liberty.

What the story of Abraham means is something very simple. He had come with his father, Terah, and his wife, Sarai, to live in Haran, the Babylonian city, high up the Bëlikh as it rolls southward into the Euphrates. Here was the seat of the worship of Sin, the Assyrian moon god, with all its bestial rites, and here God spoke to the patriarch. Here, in other words, in the midst of the licentious ceremonies which were to be spread over the civilized earth in the name of Astarte, of Ishtar, or of Venus, Abraham got his first glimpse of Principle, which showed him that indulgence in license, in the lusts of the flesh, ultimates in sin, disease, and death. He realized that if he abandoned himself to this license, he would become the prisoner of the flesh, but that if, on the other hand, he abandoned this license, he would begin to gain that liberty which is freedom from the flesh. Therefore, he shook the dust of license off his feet, at the gates of Haran, at the very feet of the zikkurats, and went out from his country, and his kindred, and his father's house, and crossed the great river, the river Euphrates, the name of which Mrs. Eddy has defined, on page 585 of Science and Health, in the words, "Divine Science encompassing the universe and man; the true idea of God; a type of the glory which is to come; metaphysics taking the place of physics; the reign of righteousness."

Centuries later there came a man who had made the crossing of this mental Euphrates, this dividing line between license and liberty, far more effectually than Abraham, and yet who said of Abraham, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad." Jesus the Christ realized how, in the streets of Haran, in the very midst of the scenes of license which had accompanied the worship of the zikkurat, Abraham had dimly seen the Christ, or Truth, and in that first dim glimpse had found the spiritual hammer which was to strike from off him the heaviest fetters of license, and so enable him to seek, in the land of promise, the liberty of the sons of God.

This vision of the Christ, which to the end remained to Abraham something of a glorious ideal, was reduced to terms of proof, or demonstration, by Jesus the Christ, when, in the temptations in the wilderness, he put the flesh, the world, and the devil under his feet, as the preliminary to showing to the world that liberty is the very opposite of license, that it is, indeed, entire freedom from the passions of the physical senses, and from the limitations of the flesh. This liberty frees a man from sickness and death, and shows him how he may heal the sick and raise the dead, or how he may annihilate matter as Jesus did when he fed the multitudes and walked upon the lake. But it can be won only in the way Abraham strove to walk, and as Jesus of Nazareth did walk, in the path of the Christ, which leads over the Euphrates into the promised land. Therefore, surely, was it that Mrs. Eddy wrote, on page 267 of Science and Health, "The robes of Spirit are 'white and glistering,' like the raiment of Christ. Even in this world, therefore, 'let thy garments be always white.' 'Blessed is the man that endureth [overcometh] temptation: for when he is tried, [proved faithful], he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him.'"