This morning at a busy traffic intersection, I watched the traffic officer at his pivotal location. He was actively alert, fearless, confident, eager to serve intelligently the needs of all. With a slight movement of his hand, or sometimes just the motion of a finger, he gave the law's permission to move ahead, or with an open palm conveyed the law's command to stop.

No one refused to obey. No one tried to force his way contrary to the officer's well-reasoned judgments. What was active here? Law. The officer was, in a sense, the embodiment, or representative, of the law of the Commonwealth. This enabled him to act with authority and assurance. The law had chosen him to assert it.

Motorists and pedestrians concurred and obeyed, because in their thought too was a sense of the law. The law was as much theirs as his, only he was representing them all in implementing it. I was impressed by how quietly, easily, effectively, and beneficially it worked. And the reason the law worked so well was that all concerned were thinking the law. It was a mental force controlling them and their actions. Hands, feet, bodies, cars, all were controlled by this mind-force.

These facts, so apparent with regard to a human traffic law, hint the nature of God's law, the Mind-force which controls all true identity, thought, and action in the universe, and controls them more certainly than the traffic law controls the traffic. If through ignorance or willfulness someone attempts to violate the traffic law, all the forces of the Commonwealth would, if necessary, be available to punish and correct him—to overcome the lawless state of thought.

Christian Science is helping us to see how presently active God's law is—in us. The Psalmist saw that law inheres in man, and said, "The law of his God is in his heart; none of his steps shall slide." What a comforting and scientific thought. The spiritual fact is that, regardless of where we, our dear ones, or our friends may be; regardless of the temptations of material sense; regardless of the manifold lawless, endangering suggestions of error, the law of God— the constructive forces of Spirit, Mind—is always working in them and in us, directing every thought, act, and judgment, and protecting from all that is lawless.

No one has to struggle in order to invoke God's law—the omnipresent, omniactive forces of Love and good. Nor is it necessary always to repeat statements of truth many times in order to heal through this law. God's law is already present, working, and accomplishing its work. Our need is with confidence, born of understanding, to realize and rejoice in this fact. No forces really are, but the forces of Mind, the one Ego, and these spiritual forces are the law of God. They constitute, govern, and preserve man eternally.

A small boy was asked by his mother, who was suffering from a headache, to give her a Christian Science treatment. He went off by himself, but soon returned and went out to play. His mother was surprised with the brevity of his treatment. However, she realized the headache had gone. When asked how he had worked for her, he replied, "I said 'the scientific statement of being'" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 468). "And did you say it only once?" his mother asked. "Why, yes," said he. "Why should I say it any more? God is not deaf!" He had realized something of what Isaiah was doubtless thinking when he said, "Behold the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear." The prophet and the child saw something of the immediate availability and instant operation of the forces of Life and Love—God's law—for man. So can we.

Sometimes more than saying "the scientific statement of being" may be needed to accomplish a healing, but it is never merely the amount of time or the number of words we use that heals. Rather is it primarily the degree of understanding with which we realize man's oneness with God and His law, and man's resulting separateness from the false forces of evil. The forces which seem so real in a dream go to nought when the dreamer wakens. So our immunity to the forces that produce sin, disease, and death appears as through spiritualization of thought we awaken from mortality's dream.

All the time forces are at work in us. "Withdraw them," says Mrs. Eddy (Science and Health, p. 124), "and creation must collapse." We begin to see that these forces are really the forces of Mind, coactive with Mind; that our individuality is constituted by Mind with these moral, spiritual, intelligent forces specifically active as God's thoughts. Thus are we animated, activated, conditioned, and controlled. Here is the natural, lawful—or law-filled—status of being for you, for me, for all.

Jesus' mission was to fulfill the law, to prove fully the present availableness of the omnipotent, irresistible forces of Life, Love, and Truth—identified as God's thoughts—to liberate, regulate, and completely govern the being of man, to make appear his health, happiness, and immortality. He refuted and nullified lawless, material force, and proved it unable to make or to destroy man; proved it impotent to afflict or impair him; proved that its only competency is to destroy the suppositional concepts of suppositional mortal mind, which has nothing to do with the real man's existence, condition, or continuance. God's law, divine Mind-force, alone is the governor, conditioner, and controller of his being.

Paul Stark Seeley