Righteousness is law, and law is that alone which is true. There is, therefore, no law of sin. Sin is the human deflection from the law of righteousness. It does not break that law, because the very nature of law makes it unbreakable. All that there is of a supposititious infringement of spiritual law is an ignorance of it which leads to an attempt to disregard it. Only an ignorance of law could induce anybody to attempt to ignore it. For an understanding of it would be sufficient to convince the offender that he must himself be the worst sufferer. A human law is an entirely different thing. The man who is strong enough to break it may seem to break it with impunity, no matter how just it may be. The man who is weak enough can be made to obey it, no matter how wrong it may be. But the fact that cause produces effect, that like is produced from like, that Truth cannot lie, these are metaphysical facts which no man by taking thought can alter.

The breach of a human law may be forgiven, but it is beyond any power to forgive an attempted breach of law. A man who plants a vineyard of brambles may be forgiven a million times for not planting vines, but law will not permit him to gather a single grape from his thorns. A man who makes a calculation based on the fact that two and two are something other than four, may be forgiven for doing so, but every calculation he makes will end in disaster, in spite of all the forgiveness possible. "Principle is imperative," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 329 of Science and Health. "You cannot mock it by human will. Science is a divine demand, not a human. Always right, its divine Principle never repents, but maintains the claim of Truth by quenching error. The pardon of divine mercy is the destruction of error." If Principle could repent, if it could maintain that like did not produce like, that Truth was not true, that two and two were not four, then instead of cosmos chaos would reign, and there would be no such thing as Principle. Therefore, when Christ Jesus said, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled," he stated an absolutely scientific fact. He proclaimed law in which effect was bound to follow cause without any possible deviation.

If a man hunger and thirst after righteousness, nothing on earth can prevent him from attaining righteousness. Every day the world witnesses people hungering and thirsting after evil, and getting their fill of evil quite inevitably. In order, however, to hunger and thirst after righteousness it is necessary to understand the law of righteousness. To hunger and thirst after a human ideal of righteousness is by no means to be sure of attaining righteousness. For a human ideal of righteousness is not righteousness, but a material concept, itself outside spiritual law. Because righteousness is a spiritual fact, it is law, and absolute obedience to law can always be demonstrated by the attainment of the desired end; in other words, the effect follows the cause. Christ Jesus was hungering and thirsting after righteousness when he went out into the wilderness and fought his battle with unrighteousness. He overcame the appetites of the flesh, the craving for vainglory, the lust of power, in a way in which, because of his understanding of mental causation, these things could not have been presented to another man. Having in this way gained his knowledge of the truth, his understanding of Principle, he came back from the wilderness to prove that he could be in the world without being of it, and to demonstrate his obedience to righteousness by showing the fruits of righteousness, by healing the sick, by walking on the waters, and by raising the dead.

The satisfaction of obedience to law is seen in the fact that the effects are not haphazard. Thus the hungering and thirsting after righteousness must be rewarded. After all, righteousness is only rightness. Literally it is straightness, and a man is as right or as straight as he is obedient to divine law. But obedience to divine law is predicated in a knowledge of rightness, which is Truth. That was why Jesus declared, "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Continuing in the word of Christ is obedience to the Logos, and obedience to the Logos is obviously living in accordance with the spiritual and not a material standard. "In the beginning," says the writer of the Fourth Gospel, "was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Manifestly, then, abiding in the word of Christ is obedience to divine law, and thus no man who takes materiality for his standard can possibly hunger and thirst after righteousness, and so be filled with it. The very acceptance of a material standard constitutes disobedience to law, for obedience to law is only possible in the degree in which a man repudiates any material standard and accepts the spiritual standard, which is precisely what Paul was insisting upon to the Ephesians when he wrote, "That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness."

Now, precisely because two and two make four, precisely because Truth is true and nothing else, precisely because like produces like, the lusting after Spirit must produce a spiritual effect, the man who lusts after righteousness must be filled. This very lusting after righteousness is the determined effort to overcome sin, for sin is repugnant to a man when he has once gained a knowledge of the truth, and is hungering and thirsting for that truth. The very hungering and thirsting after truth is a repudiation of sin, and so while the man who hungers and thirsts after righteousness must be filled with righteousness, the man who turns aside from righteousness, who thinks he can ignore law, and indulge in the lusts of the flesh, is being obedient to what Paul terms the law of his members, and obedience to the law of his members means the attainment of the hideous catalogue of the lusts of the flesh. This is precisely what Mrs. Eddy herself says, on pages 36 and 37 of Science and Health: "Can God therefore overlook the law of righteousness which destroys the belief called sin? Does not Science show that sin brings suffering as much to-day as yesterday? They who sin must suffer. 'With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.' " The man who pursues sin pursues, it is true, a mirage, but the mirage is real to him so long as he is deceived by it. So long as his deception lasts, he finds a law in his mirage, but the slightest understanding of Principle which frees him from his ignorance will show him that what he has taken for law is not law at all, and that he can demonstrate this by breaking his fancied law at any moment. If, on the other hand, he hungers and thirsts after righteousness, he must bring forth the fruit of the Spirit. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law."

Frederick Dixon.