My brother's keeper is God. Simple fairness requires that I acknowledge and respect that fact because I acknowledge and respect it with regard to myself. My own keeper is God. My complete allegiance is due to Him, and He alone is responsible for me. He needs me in my true selfhood as the perfect idea which could not exist unless there was perfect Mind to conceive it. Hence, in my true selfhood I bear witness to God's presence, and since He needs His witness, He, being all-powerful, will supply His own need and remain my keeper eternally. So, likewise, my brother's.

The so-called Golden Rule, uttered by the master Christian (Matt. 7:12), "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them," is the key to the right position on this subject. What one knows about himself he must know also about his brother. The relationship of God to man and of man to God is primary. Man is not primarily responsible for man. God is responsible for man, but each of us is responsible for his own right concept of God as his keeper. No individual can entertain the right concept of himself, that is, understand man to be in the keeping of God, until he includes every individual in that same concept.

Hence the impertinent question of Cain, when God asked the whereabouts of Cain's brother, Abel, whom Cain had slain (Gen. 4:9), "Am I my brother's keeper?" was a perverted acknowledgment of truth. Since the answer, in a primary sense, is "No," the question was employed to hide the fact that what Cain was responsible for had been neglected by him, namely, a right sense of himself in the keeping of God. This neglect was evidenced by his failure to entertain a right sense of the true identity of Abel as remaining forever in the keeping of God, and his consequent failure to keep his human obligation to refrain from any effort to destroy his fellow man.

Since Cain had no true concept of himself as spiritual idea in the keeping of the divine Mind which created him, his experience was to be in accord with his impaired concept. God informed him that he was to wander friendless over the face of the earth. But the remarkable Scriptural narrative preserved, as Scriptural narratives are intended to do, some hint of the spiritual reality. Cain, though an outcast, was to be immune from being slain himself. Could not that pronouncement of his immunity by the divine Father be regarded as a hint that Cain, like Abel and all the race of Adam, was to come to know ultimately and rightly who man's keeper is? And to come to act in accord with that knowledge, lovingly, considerately, protectively?

In line with this the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, points out that since demonstration of Christian Science depends upon spiritual understanding, lack of that understanding during darkened periods of mankind's experience may seem to obstruct complete demonstration until after what mortal sense calls death. Then she declares challengingly (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 254): "But the human self must be evangelized. This task God demands us to accept lovingly to-day, and to abandon so fast as practical the material, and to work out the spiritual which determines the outward and actual."

It is within the ability of every individual to terminate the illusion of a darkened period in his own consciousness and thus to achieve the evangelization of the human self. But this achievement demands love in all its infinite meaning: love that includes, but extends far beyond, the boundaries of personal nourishment; love that wholly reveals one's true selfhood, but is forever unselfish; love that rejoices in another's high status with God and thus establishes one's own; love that entertains no whisper of jealousy, but recognizes one's neighbor's great attainment as an illustration of God's marvelous provision for the attainment of all His children, including that of oneself.

The secret of such love is forever barred from material sense, but to spiritual sense it is normally and unmistakably rooted in the recognition of God as divine Parent and in the spiritual resolution to avail oneself of the joy of holding each of God's children in the esteem in which one rejoices that he too is held by the divine Father. This love, which melts all error away, will never find expression in such flippant remarks as: "My friend helped me, but I know that all help comes from God. Hence I owe God all and my friend nothing." Each individual in his true selfhood is the man by whom God expresses Himself. If love comes to an individual, helpfully, upliftingly, regeneratively, it comes because God is expressing Himself; and man is the expression. Hence gratitude to the Giver will include gratitude to that which makes evident the presence of the gift.

In a very special and secondary sense, therefore, I am my brother's keeper, because our common Parent requires me to know myself as man by keeping my brother in consciousness as God made him. My duty to reflect my divine Parent would be unperformed if I neglected to know my brother as God knows him. But my brother does not depend upon me, nor I upon him. Man is at the mercy of God, not of man. Each individual can appear in his status as man only as he works as God works, loves as God loves. Each individual is responsible for his own thoughts and acts, for consciously dwelling in the bosom of the Father and looking out from Him upon His universe, seeing it with reflected understanding exactly as the Father sees it.

For God, divine Mind, keeps man, His spiritual idea, at one with Himself, and man keeps his concept of God and of all His ideas at one with the Mind which conceives all ideas. Mrs. Eddy has expressed it with assurance and with prophecy (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 279): "God is Father, infinite, and this great truth, when understood in its divine metaphysics, will establish the brotherhood of man, end wars, and demonstrate 'on earth peace, good will toward men.'" This fatherhood of God assures unity of His children. Hence God is my brother's keeper, and mine.

George Channing