William Shenstone exposed a base quality of human thinking when he wrote, "There is nothing more universally commended than a fine day; the reason is, that people can commend it without envy." In an address at Edinburgh University, Barrie defined envy as "the most corroding of the vices," and Fielding thus pictures it: "Some folks rail against other folks because other folks have what some folks would be glad of."

This vicious vice of envy runs from the light of day. It hides in hidden haunts in the inner hearts of men, often covered with a smirky smile, while tincturing thought with its polluting poison. None who shelter it enjoy it; yet, lacking excuse, it clings leech-like, a mental termite undermining the foundations of friendship and the home of brotherhood. Too few are willing to admit its presence or to seek the antidote that can neutralize its sway.

The Science of Christianity, the Christ Science, brings the one permanent cure for envy and its next of kin, jealousy and covetousness. This remedy is the true idea of God and man. This true idea exposes these destructive thought qualities as never related to, nor having any place in, the consciousness of the man of God's making —the true consciousness and being of you and me. They exist only in the godless, negative, material mind, and in that counterfeit sense of thought and consciousness which expresses it.

If you or I accept as our thinking the suggestion of envy, jealousy, or covetousness, what are we doing? We are believing there is a mortal, material mind, which has made a material creation and peopled it with materially thinking, mortal personalities. We are believing that our identity and consciousness is material, so made and so environed, and that we are associated with other mortals who dwell in this material realm. Further, we believe that certain of these mortals have something in the way of place, power, prestige, or material possessions that we much desire; and because we do not have them, we consent to be resentful, critical, and grudging toward those who have, Where does this lead us? Nowhere, just nowhere! Jealousy, envy, covetousness are a dangerous trio. To permit any one of them to lodge in our mental home is to shelter a relentless enemy to our spiritual progress. Solomon so indicated when he called envy "the rottenness of the bones."

How then can we destroy these enemies and vanquish them forever? How can we change our thought so as to react to the success, progress, and attainment of others with gratitude and unselfish joy instead of with jealousy, envy, and resentment? By becoming more clearly aware of the spiritual and true order of existence, wherein every individual is given of God that full and continuing measure of life, health, ability, right activity, and satisfying success native to God's own son, or manifestation.

Jealousy, envy, and covetousness build on the premise that our brother has something we have not, but would much like to have. But actually every individual is forever fully provided for. His brother has no more than he, and he no more than his brother. He and we are not rival human personalities, but spiritual individualities, each destined to have and fill his place in the wisdom-ordered universe of God, each joyously concurring in the success, beauty, ability, and accomplishment of his brother, in whom he sees the perfect handiwork and individual evidence of God.

Let us see and declare that we and our brother are not rival mortals, with conflicting interests, not strivers to outdo or to supplant each other, or get for ourselves anything that is justly our brother's.

The Christ-idea of God and man reveals that every individual is God-constituted, spiritual, perfect, and complete. This is true now. Further, man is always effect, never cause. He is what God causes him to be; he has what God causes him to have; he knows what God causes him to know. Being God's perfect work, he is eternally satisfied in his unassailable perfection. God makes him complete, and forever so maintains him. He cannot and does not envy, or covet, or feel jealousy toward another, for his spiritual perfectness provides no soil in which such thoughts may root and grow. He sees in creation the spiritual sense of brotherhood. He rejoices in his own unchangeable perfectness and in his brother's similar status. He has no occasion to think of envying another, for he knows his God-made individuality must forever include all that is essential to the son of God and exclude all that is foreign to the son.

The Christian Scientist, therefore, masters the thieving thoughts of jealousy, envy, and covetousness by turning from the whole mortal scene and finding, in some degree, his God-given consciousness of the kingdom of Love. There, he realizes, are no envying, coveting, jealous mortals, but a universe of Love-governed ideas, not competing with or rivaling one another, not one desiring to have what another has; for each has all that he needs to have or, under divine law, can have as an individually perfect manifestation of the one Ego, the one cause.

If in our human experience another is given the recognition or reward which we feel is our just due, indulgence in envy is no aid to correct the wrong. Trust in God and His Christ is the way out. Our brother is as much under God's control as are we, and the one controlling Mind works justly and omnipotently in all life, consciousness, and identity to establish equity, justice, and good will. The equipollence of Deity crowds envy into oblivion. Seeing, too, that we live not to gain the plaudits or the places accorded by men, but rather to glorify, in our daily round, the Love, Mind, and Life which is our God, will help to nullify these errors and bring in due time, according to our worthiness, right human adjustments and advance us on the road Truthward.

No student of Christian Science should be long in rooting out these arch enemies—envy, jealousy, covetousness—to his spiritual growth when he ponders the exposure and arraignment with which Mary Baker Eddy describes them and their detrimental effects on the one who accepts them as his thinking. She says (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 129), "If a man is jealous, envious, or revengeful, he will seek occasion to balloon an atom of another man's indiscretion, inflate it, and send it into the atmosphere of mortal mind—for other green eyes to gaze on: he will always find somebody in his way, and try to push him aside; will see somebody's faults to magnify under the lens that he never turns on himself."

Envy, jealousy, and covetousness are born of the fearful belief that man is an incomplete mortal. The truth, revealed by Christ and Christian Science, is that individual man is the individually complete manifestation of God, lacking no good thing, and forever satisfied in and with his glorious, God-given state.

Paul Stark Seeley