One of the many blessings Christian Science offers is the way by which an individual whose happiness, success, and progress seem to be blighted by the wrongdoing of another, can mentally free himself from this blighted sense through an understanding of God and man.

Evil aggressively suggests to many individuals: You are a fairly good sort, but that other fellow is the cause of your trouble, and until he changes his ways your life is likely to be far from a happy one. This trouble-maker appears in many roles. Often it is a husband or a wife, a business associate, a competitor, a critic or a gossiper, a jealous or malicious opponent. How often we are tempted to think that if we could only remake this other fellow, life would have a rosy hue.

The one who is plagued with the common belief that he is entrapped in the material sense of life and selfhood, bound to some person or situation that is intolerable, his happiness clouded, his ambitions thwarted, his progress hampered, his health and life perhaps jeopardized by some wrong thinking, wrong-acting mortal, can surely find his deliverance in Christian Science.

Viewed in the light of the Science of Life such situations are entirely mental, and are misconceptions of creation and man. Not one presents the true concept of man and his relationship to his fellow man. We must be willing to seek out the true or spiritual idea of Life and manhood, which, in the degree we comprehend it, will bring a satisfying answer to our problem.

The basic error that is the seeming source of these discordant conditions is mortal mind, the lying opposite of God, the immortal and good Mind. Mortal mind claims to originate a universe of material concepts, persons, animals, and things. Most animate of its concepts are mortal personalities, to which it claims to give a temporary life and mind, temporary faculties and, not to be overlooked, a will and a way of its own. These mortal personalities, like puppets controlled by their puppeteer, are dominated by mortal mind, which impels them to act as it would have them act, and to speak as it would have them speak. Mortal existence is its show. Mortals fill the roles in mortality's play, and it is a round-the-clock performance.

No such happening is initiated by or has any sanction from God, the only cause. God is good, infinite good; God's creation is Mind's intelligent, harmonious manifestation, the universe of Mind's ideas, the highest of which is man. All ideas are equally and eternally under the absolute control of their common cause, divine Mind. Not one individual can be deprived of, nor can he surrender, his spiritual, loving, humble nature or think or do aught that would affect adversely the joy, harmony, right activity, and advancement of another.

Why not? Because the one omnipotent, omniactive Mind holds within itself, and under its constant control, every individual manifestation of being. Mortal mind never enters Mind's infinitude, never touches, influences, or affects one of God's children or permits him to be made over by mortal mind into an obstructor of another's happiness or the opposer of another's success.

Christ Jesus knew all this and more when he said without qualification to his followers, "Your joy no man taketh from you" (John 16:22). No mortal sense of man can ever gain the power or right to take from you or me the God-given joy that is forever coincident with our spiritual sense of being. This God-given sense of reality acquaints us with the harmony, immortality, and intactness of spiritual creation, and with the truth that in the only real creation all individuality is embraced, eternally secure in its God-caused relatedness to the Father and in the unity of understanding and brotherliness that is natural and essential to the harmony of His great family.

Christ Jesus never let this lie that error has some person through whom it can rob one of his joy confound him. The gross materiality which blinded all but a few to his God-sent message, the hate, slander, and treachery which threatened to defeat him and nullify his mission, he overcame with his great understanding love for God and man, for Truth and its manifestation. This understanding love for spiritual reality delivered him. It will also deliver you.

"The Christian Scientist," says Mary Baker Eddy, "is alone with his own being and with the reality of things" (Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 20). Not alone with intolerable persons or impossible situations, but alone with his own God-given being, his spiritual consciousness, and the real creation of right-minded ideas of Mind, wherein mortal mind and its personified phases of evil are unknown. Here is the saving idea of being. The individual who finds it, loves it, and is faithful in increasing his knowledge of it will bring to difficult human relationships, where one mortal appears to be restricting or beclouding the life and progress of another, the remedy of Love's providing.

The material sense testimony that would deceive, then rob us, must be vigorously repudiated, not once or twice, but unendingly, with the spiritual idea of being, which includes the individuality of that other fellow as well as our own. Our brother must not be abandoned, in belief, to mortal mind. If that could be, there would be no intactness in God's work, no unalterable unity, and so no divine idea that could work out our salvation.

As the result of steadfastly clinging to spiritual reality and never conceding reality to evil's claim to personality, the faithful student can rightfully expect human adjustments that bring an improved order, greater freedom, and undarkened joy. With undoubting confidence he can know that God never surrenders to mortal persons His absolute power over the life, activity, and destiny of any one of His sons and daughters. The all-loving Mind is forever at hand to make plain through the Christ-idea the harmony and peace which no earth scene can take away and no phase of material-mindedness destroy. Love's kingdom in all its perfection is eternally at hand for each one of us to find and enjoy through the spiritual idea of being.

Paul Stark Seeley