The effort to enforce obedience to rules or laws—whether they be company policies, school regulations, family rules, or national laws—occupies the sincere attention of many people.

Human laws or rules are usually intended to help, to bring protection, freedom, and advancement. However, because they are of human origin, they are not self-enforcing facts but man-made decisions subject to change, needing physical power and/or popular acceptance to make them work.

In contrast, spiritual, or divine, law is a self-enforcing, unchanging fact, revealing that God, good, is the only cause and power and that His reflection, man and the universe, must therefore express only qualities of good. This law is an authoritative divine decree, which enforces itself throughout God's spiritual universe.

Several years ago I witnessed a significant example in my own family of God's power to enforce His law. Shortly after I had remarried, I pulled into the driveway one noon to find my twelve-year-old daughter in tears. She had been ironing, her older brother had teased her, a chase around the house had ensued, and in the course of it the iron had hit the floor and broken. It seemed right to separate the two children for a while, since I had a previous appointment to keep that afternoon and could not stay home. I asked my son to join me for the rest of the day, but instead he silently slipped out the back door for his tennis class. When I discovered this, my first impulse was to enforce my authority and the human rule of obedience to one's parent by following him and insisting that he spend the afternoon with me. My second thought, "Oh well, wait until tonight and let your husband take care of this," brought me up short. Did my new husband have more power to enforce discipline, or right action, than this child's real Father, God?

My thought now lifted to affirm the presence of the divine law, or rule. I joyously acknowledged God as the loving, powerful, ever-present Father-Mother of all and refused to dwell on the mental picture of a teenage child who had defied his human mother in the absence of a human father or stepfather.

Genuine concern for righting my own thought about law and law enforcement took precedence over the desire for disciplining a child for disobeying me.

Rejoicing in the knowledge that God not only enacts spiritual law but enforces it, I found the forty-five-minute drive to my appointment zipping by as more and more of the truths of Christian Science filled my thought. I saw that God is the perfect Principle of man and that man is the perfect expression of this Principle. Prayerfully I recognized that God created man, His likeness, to express goodness, obedience, and health. Because man reflects God, he can do nothing of himself, cannot possibly express qualities unlike God, or good. Paul glimpsed something of this absolute fact when he said in his letter to the Philippians, "For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." Because man reflects the Mind which is God, he expresses the will of God, or good; and because he reflects the power of God, he expresses the ability to do the will of God.

Filled with gratitude, absolutely assured by the Bible promise that "all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children," I remembered that God's word was not just a message but a causative force that fulfilled the message itself. Arriving at my destination, I put aside this lunchtime episode ... until I returned home, and was met by two hugging, joyous siblings handing me notes of profuse apology and a beautiful brand-new iron purchased with their scanty, hard-earned savings. No human solution or requirement could have resolved this situation any better.

In answer to the question "How can I govern a child metaphysically?" Mary Baker Eddy replies in her book Miscellaneous Writings: "Motives govern acts, and Mind governs man. If you make clear to the child's thought the right motives for action, and cause him to love them, they will lead him aright ..." And in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures she also writes, "Truth, Life, and Love are the only legitimate and eternal demands on man, and they are spiritual lawgivers, enforcing obedience through divine statutes."

God causes man to obey His will, to know, love, and express good, by virtue of the fact that man is reflection, the image of God. It was Truth that demanded I change my thinking about authority, about who or what enforces discipline. Truth demanded that I bring my thoughts and actions under the authority of God's law and drop all human reasoning based on outward evidence contradictory to this law. And it was Love that caused my children to put their native love of good into practice and to put aside arguing and disobedience.

The more we understand Truth, Life, and Love (all names for God) and bring our human thoughts and actions into accord with spiritual law, the more of spiritual reality—the all-presence of good—we will see evidenced in our experience. The eternal demands of Life, Truth, and Love cause man to love and fulfill God's law willingly and joyously. And the demonstration of this eternal truth always results in right thinking, right activity, obedience to sound human rules, and tender Christian deeds.

Christ Jesus practiced scientific Christianity some two thousand years ago. He healed the sick and raised the dead through his understanding of spiritual law and its self-enforcing power—the law of health, wholeness, life, joy, and abundance here and now. Others, too, recognized that these healings were the result of divine law, not personal power. Remember how the centurion who requested that Jesus heal his servant spoke of also being a man under authority? (See Matt. 8:5–13.) The centurion understood that the soldiers under him obeyed because they knew his orders were backed by the authoritative power of the Roman government. Likewise, the centurion recognized that the sick and the sinning responded to Jesus' command to be whole because of Jesus' divine authority. The Master proved God's self-enforcing law, man's unchanging perfection as the likeness of God.

When we find ourselves in the role of human law enforcer, perhaps our greatest need is to know what spiritual, or divine, law is. As we solidify our understanding and conviction of God's power to enforce His law, to cause everything He has created to express His nature, we will be guided to take whatever practical steps are needed to fulfill our human role. When this is done, our actions reflect great love, an absence of fear, and that calm spiritual authority stemming from unwavering trust in God's ability and power to maintain His law of goodness throughout His creation, to enforce His will here and now and everywhere.

This doesn't mean we may not have to take firm human steps to require obedience at times. But this firmness will be backed by an understanding of the power of God's self-enforcing law. Human opinion, insisting on forcing its own sense of rightness in its own way, yields in humility to spiritual law—to the recognition that God's power enforces goodness under all circumstances.

EPHESIANS

I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Ephesians 4:1–3