Any person who will take the trouble to look up the ninety-first psalm in a modern commentary will make some quite immaterial discoveries. First, it will be learned that it was not written by David, which most people rather more than suspected; and, last, that verses four, eight, and ten are glosses—which does not seem to help much. It may be recorded in addition, that the word dwelling, in verse ten, should be tent, which, if the whole verse is a gloss, does not matter in the least, and, if it is not, is quite immaterial. On the whole, therefore, the contribution of modern theological scholarship to the world's interest in or understanding of the poem, does not appear excessive. Indeed, it is not an altogether far-fetched deduction that the King James translators did as much to assist humanity, in their ignorance, as the higher critics with all their scholarship.

Now the ninety-first psalm has been for centuries one of the great solaces of the English speaking world, but this has certainly not been for any of the reasons suggested by the latter-day commentators. Many and many a reader has found marvelous peace in the past, and many another will find the same marvelous peace in the future, over the offending verse, "There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling." But for centuries, all the same, the text has been robbed of its real significance for mankind, because mankind has failed to realize that there was something more than a mere figurative interpretation to be applied to the words of the preceding verse, "Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation?" How can mankind make God its habitation? Mrs. Eddy has answered this question in showing that good is simply an attribute of God and of God's synonyms, Spirit, Principle, and Mind. Therefore the moment a man claims divine Mind as his habitation, he is, indeed, safe. "The exterminator of error," Mrs. Eddy wrote on page 469 of Science and Health, "is the great truth that God, good, is the only Mind, and that the supposititious opposite of infinite Mind—called devil or evil—is not Mind, is not Truth, but error, without intelligence or reality."

It is, of course, obvious, and it has never been questioned, that God is intelligence; otherwise there is an intelligence which God did not make,—and yet God made all that was made. This intelligence is, equally of course, divine Mind. And as Mind can only produce ideas, man is the idea of God, and lives, and moves, and has being in the Mind which gave birth to him. Consequently a man's safety lies not in any material precautions, but in his understanding of Truth, of God, for God is Truth as necessarily and inevitably as He is Mind. When, then, the individual makes Truth his habitation, when he realizes that he is an idea in divine Mind, no evil can possibly come nigh his dwelling, for divine Mind is his dwelling, and evil is unknown to God, who is infinite Truth, just as it is unknown to infinite Mind. The human mind vociferously insists that God must know evil, otherwise the divine Mind could not be infinite. But if God is infinite, and God is good, what room is there in infinite good for evil, and does it not follow that evil, being something devoid of Principle, must, for that very reason, be nothing more than a sense of the absence of good, and so, like darkness, a mere negation—an unreality? That, surely, was why Jesus the Christ said of it that it was a lie—for a lie is a mere negation, something disappearing into its own nothingness as soon as its untruth is exposed.

This then, is the explanation of the psalmist's saying, "Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling." The world, as Jesus the Christ taught, and as Christian Science teaches, is a world not of material phenomena but of ideas materially objectified, or mentally reflected in what seem to be independent material phenomena, but actually are ideas subject to Mind. The deceptiveness of these phenomena may be seen in such everyday instances as the apparent rising and setting of the sun, or the curious vagaries of sound and reflection. But these vagaries, every one knows, are the result of ignorance, and may be corrected by fuller knowledge. What every one does not know is that the human mind itself is only a counterfeit of the real or divine Mind, and that, as this is grasped, the truth which Jesus declared would free men from their ignorance is grasped also, with the result that what were once regarded as physical laws can be broken and put aside, as Jesus broke them and put them aside, in the miracles or proofs of the truth of his gospel or teaching.

This is why Christian Science as a religion is so intensely practical. It enables a man, whether in the counting house or in the trenches, whether in the midst of a cyclone of sensual temptation or of wind and lightning, to prove that no plague shall come nigh his dwelling. For his dwelling is divine Mind, and so long as he realizes this he is safe. This was why Mrs. Eddy, in seven pregnant words, on page 392 of Science and Health, wrote, "Stand porter at the door of thought." The man who does that, untiringly and sleeplessly, is safe. In a world of ideas every untoward physical manifestation must take shape in thought and be molded in thought before it can materialize. A man controls his own thoughts, and therefore what he does is what he thinks, and what he thinks is what he is. If he fills his mind with thoughts of sensual pleasure, he cannot exclude sensual pain, for he has mentally admitted the power of matter to govern him, in riches or in poverty, in joy or in sorrow, in life or in death. If, then, he wishes to avoid pain and sorrow, he must deny the flesh and its lusts. But he can only deny these as he fills his mind with Truth instead of with error, and grasps the fact that Spirit is the only reality, and consequently that matter is harmonious or inharmonious in the exact proportion in which its subserviency to Principle, God, is demonstrated. "Good thoughts," wrote Mrs. Eddy on page 210 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany," "are an impervious armor; clad therewith you are completely shielded from the attacks of error of every sort." And so the psalmist wrote: "Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling." This is the fortress of Spirit.