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MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS

CHAPTER VIII -- PRECEPT UPON PRECEPT

"THY WILL BE DONE"

THIS is the law of Truth to error, "Thou shalt surely die." This law is a divine energy. Mortals cannot prevent the fulfillment of this law; it covers all sin and its effects. God is All, and by virtue of this nature and allness He is cognizant only of good. Like a legislative bill that governs millions of mortals whom the legislators know not, the universal law of God has no knowledge of evil, and enters unconsciously the human heart and governs it.

Mortals have only to submit to the law of God, come into sympathy with it, and to let His will be done. This unbroken motion of the law of divine Love gives, to the weary and heavy-laden, rest. But who is willing to do His will or to let it be done? Mortals obey their own wills, and so disobey the divine order.

All states and stages of human error are met and mastered by divine Truth's negativing error in the way of God's appointing. Those "whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth." His rod brings to view His love, and interprets to mortals the gospel of healing. David said, "Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept Thy word." He who knows the end from the beginning, attaches to sin due penalties as its antidotes and remedies.

Who art thou, vain mortal, that usurpest the prerogative of divine wisdom, and wouldst teach God not to punish sin, that would shut the mouth of His prophets, and cry, "Peace, peace; when there is no peace." -- yea, that healest the wounds of my people slightly?

The Principle of divine Science being Love, the divine rule of this Principle demonstrates Love, and proves that human belief fulfils the law of belief, and dies of its own physics. Metaphysics also demonstrates this Principle of cure when sin is self-destroyed. Short-sighted physics admits the so-called pains of matter that destroy its more dangerous pleasures.

Insomnia compels mortals to learn that neither oblivion nor dreams can recuperate the life of man, whose Life is God, for God neither slumbers nor sleeps. The loss of gustatory enjoyment and the ills of indigestion tend to rebuke appetite and destroy the peace of the false sense. False pleasure will be, is chastened; it has no right to be at peace. To suffer for having "other gods before me," is divinely wise. Evil passions die in their own flames, but are punished before extinguished. Peace has no foothold on the false basis that evil should be concealed and that life happiness should still attend it. Joy is self-sustained; goodness and blessedness are one: suffering is self-inflicted, and good is the master of evil.

To this scientific logic and the logic of events, egotism and false charity say, " 'Not so, Lord;' it is wise to cover iniquity and punish it not, then shall mortals have peace." Divine Love, as unconscious as incapable of error, pursues the evil that hideth itself, strips off its disguises, and -- behold the result: evil, uncovered, is self-destroyed.

Christian Science never healed a patient without proving with mathematical certainty that error, when found out, is two-thirds destroyed, and the remaining third kills itself. Do men whine over a nest of serpents, and post around it placards warning people not to stir up these reptiles because they have stings? Christ said, "They shall take up serpents;" and, "Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves." The wisdom of a serpent is to hide itself. The wisdom of God, as revealed in Christian Science, brings the serpent out of its hole, handles it, and takes away its sting. Good deeds are harmless. He who has faith in woman's special adaptability to lead on Christian Science, will not be shocked when she puts her foot on the head of the serpent, as it biteth at the heel.

Intemperance begets a belief of disordered brains, membranes, stomach, and nerves; and this belief serves to uncover and kill this lurking serpent, intemperance, that hides itself under the false pretense of human need, innocent enjoyment, and a medical prescription. The belief in venereal diseases tears the black mask from the shameless brow of licentiousness, torments its victim, and thus may save him from his destroyer.

Charity has the courage of conviction; it may suffer long, but has neither the cowardice nor the foolhardiness to cover inequity. Charity is Love; and Love opens the eyes of the blind, rebukes error, and casts it out. Charity never flees before error, lest it should suffer from an encounter. Love your enemies, or you will not loose them; and if you love them, you will help to reform them.

Christ points the way of salvation. His mode is not cowardly, uncharitable, nor unwise, but it teaches mortals to handle serpents and cast out evil. Our own vision must be clear to open the eyes of others, else the blind will lead the blind and both shall fall. The sickly charity that supplies criminals with bouquets has been dealt with summarily by the good judgment of people in the Old Bay State. Inhuman medical bills, class legislation, and Salem witchcraft, are not indigenous to her son.

"Out of the depths have I delivered thee." The drowning man just rescued from the merciless wave is unconscious of suffering. Why, then, do you break his peace and cause him to suffer in coming to life? Because you wish to save him from death. Then, if a criminal is at peace is he not to be pitied and brought back to life? Or are you afraid to do this lest he suffer, trample on your pearls of thought, and turn on you and rend you? Cowardice is selfishness. When one protects himself at his neighbor's cost, let him remember, "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it." He risks nothing who obeys the law of God, and shall find the Life that cannot be lost.

Our master said, "Ye shall drink indeed of my cup." Jesus stormed sin in its citadels and kept peace with God. He drank this cup giving thanks, and he said to his followers, "Drink ye all of it," -- drink it all, and let all drink of it. He lived the spirit of his prayer, -- "Thy kingdom come." Shall we repeat our Lord's Prayer when the heart denies it, refuses to bear the cross and to fulfil the conditions of our petition? Human policy is a fool that saith in his heart, "No God" -- a caressing Judas that betrays you, and commits suicide. This godless policy never knows what happiness is, and how it is obtained.

Jesus did his work, and left his glorious career for our example. On the shore of Gennesaret he tersely reminded his students of their worldly policy. They had suffered, and seen their error. This experience caused them to remember the reiterated warning of their Master and cast their nets on the right side. When they were fit to be blest, they received the blessing. The ultimatum of their human sense of ways and means ought to silence ours. One step away from the direct line of divine Science cost them -- what? A speedy return under the reign of difficulties, darkness, and unrequited toil.

The currents of human nature rush in against the right course; health, happiness, and life flow not into one of their channels. The law of Love saith, "Not my will, but Thine, be done," and Christian Science proves that human will is lost in the divine; and Love, the white Christ, is the remunerator.

If, consciously or unconsciously, one is at work in a wrong direction, who will step forward and open his eyes to see this error? He who is a Christian Scientist, who has cast the beam out of his own eye, speaks plainly to the offender and tries to show his errors to him before letting another know it.

Pitying friends took down from the cross the fainting form of Jesus, and buried it out of their site. His disciples, who had not yet drunk of his cup, lost sight of him; they could not behold his immortal being in the form of Godlikeness.

All that I have written, taught, or lived, that is good, flowed through cross-bearing, self-forgetfulness, and my faith in the right. Suffering or Science, or both, in the proportion that their instructions are assimilated, will point the way, shorten the process, and consummate the joys of acquiescence in the methods of divine love. The Scripture saith, "He that covereth his sins shall not prosper." No risk is so stupendous as to neglect opportunities which God giveth, and not to forewarn and forearm our fellow-mortals against the evil which, if seen, can be destroyed.

May my friends and my enemies so profit by these waymarks, that what has chastened and illumined another's way may perfect their own lives by gentle benedictions. In every age, the pioneer reformer must pass through a baptism of fire. But the faithful adherents of Truth have gone on rejoicing. Christian Science gives a fearless wing and firm foundation. These are its inspiring tones from the lips of our Master, "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand." He is but "an hireling" who fleeth when he seeth the wolf coming.

Loyal Christian Scientists, be of good cheer: the night is far spent, the day dawns; God's universal kingdom will appear, Love will reign in every heart, and His will be done on earth as in heaven. PUT UP THY SWORD

While Jesus' life was full of Love, and a demonstration of Love, it appeared hate to the carnal mind, or mortal thought of his time. He said, "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household."

This action of Jesus was stimulated by the same Love that closed -- to the senses -- that wondrous life, and that summed up its demonstration in the command, "Put up thy sword." The very conflict his Truth brought, in accomplishing its purpose of Love, meant, all the way through, "Put up thy sword;" but the sword must have been drawn before it could be returned into the scabbard.

My students need to search the Scriptures and "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," to understand the personal Jesus' labor in the flesh for their salvation: they need to do this even to understand my works, their motives, aims, and tendency.

The attitude of mortal mind in being healed morally, is the same as its attitude physically. The Christian Scientist cannot heal the sick, and take error along with Truth, either in the recognition or approbation of it. This would prevent the possibility of destroying the tares: they must be separated from the wheat before they can be burned, and Jesus foretold the harvest hour and the final destruction of error through this very process, -- the sifting and the fire. The tendency of mortal mind is to go from one extreme to another: Truth comes into the intermediate space, saying, "I wound to heal; I punish to reform; I do it all in love; my peace I leave with thee: not as the world giveth, give I unto thee. Arise, let us go hence; let us depart from the material sense of God's ways and means, and gain a spiritual understanding of them."

But let us not seek to climb up some other way, as we shall do if we take the end for the beginning or start from wrong motives. Christian Science demands order and truth. To abide by these we must first understand the Principle and object of our work, and be clear that it is Love, peace, and good will toward men. Then we shall demonstrate the Principle in the way of His appointment, and not according to the infantile conception of our way; as when a child in sleep walks on the summit of the roof of the house because he is a somnambulist, and thinks he is where he is not, and would fall immediately if he knew where he was and what he was doing.

My students are at the beginning of their demonstration; they have a long warfare with error in themselves and in others to finish, and they must at this stage use the sword of Spirit.

They cannot in the beginning take the attitude, nor adopt the words, that Jesus used at the end of his demonstration.

If you would follow in his footsteps, you must not try to gather the harvest while the corn is in the blade, nor yet when it is in the ear; a wise spiritual discernment must be used in your application of his words and inference from his acts, to guide your own state of combat with error. There remaineth, it is true, a Sabbath rest for the people of God; but we must first have done our work, and entered into our rest, as the Scriptures give example. SCIENTIFIC THEISM

In the May number of our Journal, there appear a review of, and some extracts from, "Scientific Theism," by Phare Pleigh.

Now, Phare Pleigh evidently means more than "hands off." A live lexicographer, given to the Anglo-Saxon tongue, might add to the above definition the "laying on of hands" as well. Whatever his nom de plume means, an acquaintance with the author justifies one in the conclusion that he is a power in criticism, a big protest against injustice; but, the best may be mistaken.

One of these extracts is the story of the Cheshire Cat, which "vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone." Was this a witty or a happy hit at idealism, to illustrate the author's lowing point? --

"When philosophy becomes fairy-land, in which neither laws of nature nor the laws of reason hold good, the attempt of phenomenism to conceive the universe as a phenomenon without a noumenon may succeed, but not before; for it is an attempt to conceive a grin without a cat."

True idealism is a divine Science, which combines in logical sequence, nature, reason, and revelation. An effect without a cause is inconceivable; neither philosophy nor reason attempts to find one; but all should conceive and understand that Spirit cannot become less than Spirit; hence that the universe of God is spiritual, -- even the ideal world whose cause is the self-created Principle, with which its ideal or phenomenon must correspond in quality and quantity.

The fallacy of an unscientific statement is this: that matter and Spirit are one and eternal; or, that the phenomenon of Spirit is the antipode of Spirit, namely, matter. Nature declares, throughout the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, that the specific nature of all things is unchanged, and that nature is constituted of and by Spirit.

Sensuous and material realistic views presuppose that nature is matter, and that Deity is a finite person containing infinite Mind; and that these opposites, in suppositional unity and personality, produce matter, -- a third quality unlike God. Again, that matter is both cause and effect, but that the effect is antagonistic to its cause; that death is at war with Life, evil with good, -- and man a rebel against his Maker. This is neither Science nor theism. According to Holy Writ, it is a kingdom divided against itself, that shall be brought to desolation.

The nature of God must change in order to become matter, or to become both finite and infinite; and matter must disappear, for Spirit to appear. To the material sense, everything is matter; but spiritualize human thought, and our convictions change: for spiritual sense takes in new views, in which nature becomes Spirit; and Spirit is God, and God is good. Science unfolds the fact that Deity was forever Mind, Spirit; that matter never produced Mind, and vice versa.

The visible universe declares the invisible only by reversion, as error declares Truth. The testimony of material sense in relation to existence is false; for matter can neither see, hear, nor feel, and mortal mind must change all its conceptions of life, substance, and intelligence, before it can reach the immortality of Mind and its ideas. It is erroneous to accept the evidence of the material senses whence to reason out God, when it is conceded that the five personal senses can take no cognizance of Spirit or of its phenomena. False realistic views sap the Science of Principle and idea; they make Deity unreal and inconceivable, either as mind or matter; but Truth comes to the rescue of reason and immortality, and unfolds the real nature of God and the universe to the spiritual sense, which beareth witness of things spiritual, and not material.

To begin with, the notion of Spirit as cause and end, with matter as its effect, is more ridiculous than the "grin without a cat;" for a grin expresses the nature of a cat, and this nature may linger in memory: but matter does not express the nature of Spirit, and matter's graven grins are neither eliminated nor retained by Spirit. What can illustrate Dr. --'s views better than Pat's echo, when he said, "How do you do?" and echo answered, "Pretty well, I thank you!"

Dr. -- says: "The recognition of teleology in nature is necessarily the recognition of purely spiritual personality in God."

According to lexicography, teleology is the science of the final cause of things; and divine Science (and all Science is divine) neither reveals God in matter, cause in effect, nor teaches that nature and her laws are the material universe, or that the personality of infinite Spirit is finite or material. Jesus said, "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God." Now, what saith the Scripture? "God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."