To learn how to live the Beatitudes is to learn the secret of happiness. The very word "beatitude" means "a state of utmost bliss," and "to beatify" is "to make supremely happy." The Beatitudes are not directives to do something but gracious promises accompanying the task the human mind often finds difficult to compass: the task of being Christlike. They state basic spiritual law.

To live the love and truth that Christ Jesus understood and manifested, and from which his marvelously successful lifework emerged, demonstrating the possibility of full salvation for all men, is the most exacting undertaking for the Christian. It is also the most rewarding. It is from his living of the Christly law, spontaneous and never failing in its action, that the Christian Scientist draws his healing power. The Principle of this healing is Love. Living it demands spiritual discipline.

Matthew records that after preaching the Sermon on the Mount, which includes the Beatitudes, Christ Jesus began his healing work; he put forth his hand and healed the leper. To live the Master's precepts is to put off impulses inherent in the mortal, carnal sense of life. Then man as God's living, loving, truthful reflection will appear. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes, "Science will declare God aright, and Christianity will demonstrate this declaration and its divine Principle, making mankind better physically, morally, and spiritually." ^{Science and Health, p. 466;}

The Beatitudes are among the more simple passages in the Bible; yet none is more profound. In them Christ Jesus describes the qualities of his own character. We are to emulate the Christly nature. The Master came to show us how to do this; he came to prove to mankind the power of divine Love to guide, protect, and enrich human experience; to prove that we can love and are loved; that Life is God, Spirit, infinite, ever active, intelligent good; that we live by reflection in goodness and therefore are spiritual and deathless.

The word "Christian" has the implication of Christlike. Do we carry this designation with thought? With meaning? With authority? Or do our lives make a mockery of it? Each must answer that question for himself—to himself. As the world of his day watched the Master, so the world of today watches Christian Scientists to see how they live.

Under the heading "scientific translation of mortal mind," ^{pp. 115, 116;} Mrs. Eddy brings into focus the qualities of the true Christian. If we can demonstrate the moral qualities enumerated in the "Second Degree," and listed in the margin as "transitional," then we are ready to have the purely spiritual qualities given in the "Third Degree" as "reality" appear in our lives. We shall then be progressively understanding and demonstrating the Mind which was in Christ Jesus.

To be Christlike means to carry the standard of the Beatitudes, to live the Sermon on the Mount, with power and with grace. Do we recognize that compared with the spiritual riches of Mind we are yet poor in spirit, and so do we pore over the Bible and Mrs. Eddy's writings in eager desire to spiritualize and enrich our thought and character? Do we check intense pride, anger, keen personal antagonisms that might do injustice to others—all of which Mrs. Eddy warns against and which cause some to stumble in the path or be led astray? Do we meekly and thoughtfully follow our Master's example? Pride, self-will, worldly ambition, if indulged in the least, tend to grow until they become mental and moral deformities, to make us ruthless, to mislead us.

"Blessed are the merciful."^{Matt. 5:7;} How quick of tongue are we? How quick to misjudge, to chastise, to condemn from the mortal viewpoint? How pure of heart are we? Are we free enough from the evils of material sense to see with spiritual sense the grandeur of divine Principle, to discern the very essence of the divine nature and thus begin to comprehend its expression: the man of God's creating, wholesome, happy, useful? We can never really love unless we see ourselves and others as the real man, the spiritual reflection of God. "Blessed are the merciful"! If this were understood, really accepted, and obeyed by all Christians, we could avoid violence, crime, race hatred, fear, and friction between men and nations.

"Blessed are the peacemakers." ^{v. 9;} On one occasion a longtime Christian Scientist, occupying an exacting position of great usefulness, demonstrated this statement in an unusual way. After a long, busy day at her office she came home fresh and radiant. She was asked how it was that after a day of labor she could look so happy. She replied, "I knew something today that I did not tell," meaning that she had not repeated an evil report about another. Peacemakers are those who keep the peace, who do not set the fires of destructive gossip. Peacemakers are those who have overcome personal sensitiveness and irritability, who do not indulge in character assassination or in the things that make for warfare between persons or groups.

Are we able to rejoice and claim our peace—the kingdom of heaven within—when persecuted or reviled for Truth's sake? In the midst of materialistic turmoil, destructive worldliness, and excitement, can we reach out and touch God's hand for guidance and calm? Jesus often went alone to listen for God's voice. In the insistent tempo of this so-called scientific age do we take time to pray? Do we take time to live, to love, really to demonstrate God's loving-kindness?

If our answers to these questions are right, if in thought, motive, and act we sincerely endeavor to express our true, God-created selfhood, then at least from the standpoint of Christian character we have the right to claim the power to heal the sick through Christian Science. For the key to that power is the demonstration of the divine nature as our own.

Urging the early Christians to partake of the Christly nature and thus escape worldly corruption, the Apostle Peter counseled the cultivation of faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness, charity. Then he added, "If these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ." ^{II Pet. 1:8:} May we not conclude from this counsel that it is our Christliness that makes our Science fruitful?

Christian Scientists are awaking to the presence and power of divine Love, the source of reflected love and its power, and thus are meeting, in the degree of their faithfulness, the universal challenge facing individuals and nations to love one another and to love their so-called enemies. Those who do so love, walk the earth with freedom and dignity.

The last of the six religious tenets of Christian Science is a pledge required of every earnest student; it reads, "And we solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure." ^{Science and Health, p. 497.} "To be merciful, just, and pure" is to express the very essence of the Beatitudes. To live by them is to demonstrate the Christly love that heals and happifies giver and recipient alike.

Love alone is the healing power. Mrs. Eddy's life exemplified the very spirit of the Beatitudes; her power to heal points to the grand possibilities she opened for the human family to fulfill the law of Love through the Science of Christ and thus beatify life in the demonstration of universal good.