Footsteps Of His Flock®

Tell me, O thou when my soul loveth, where thou feedest,
where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one
that turneth aside by the flocks of they companions?
if thou know not, O thou fairest among women,
go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock,
and feed thy kids beside the shepherds’ tents.
(Song of Solomon)
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The ways of Christianity have not changed. Meekness selflessness and love
are the paths of his testimony and the footsteps of His flock.
(Rudimental Divine Science by Mary Baker Eddy)
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For the week of
December 29th to 31st in 2024 to January 1st to 4th in 2025.

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Prohibition by Principle

Written for The Christian Science Monitor
December 29, 1919

WITH the present-day increase of scientific understanding of God, and of the nature of the divine Mind, it was inevitable that prohibition, as that term is used in relation to the liquor traffic and other evils, should gain in strength. And it is just as certain that it will continue to be extended and to be powerfully enforced, as spiritual knowledge increases. The reason for this is that men cannot gain a perception of Spirit without losing their suppositional sense of matter and apprehending that Spirit and its expression is the totality of existence, thus being the absolute elimination of any belief of any other existence whatsoever. This dropping away of materialism in the world, as men draw nearer to discernment of infinite Principle, takes place in entirely natural ways, even though with some tumult and upheaval. Thus it comes about that in this human scheme prohibition is simply a mile-stone on the narrow, but yet in reality infinitely broad, highway out of carnal mindedness into the understanding of eternal spiritual consciousness as the only Life.
Of course, in absolute Science, the forbidding of evil is not necessary, because good is the one presence and power, a fact which results from divine Mind and its pure manifestation being infinite and knowing no element of destruction. But in the affairs of this world, men must put into effect in whatever way seems nearest right to them this truth about Principle, just in proportion as they understand it. This statement by Mary Baker Eddy, Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, covering this point, is found in “Miscellaneous Writings” (p. 260): “Mind, imbued with this Science of healing, is a law unto itself, needing neither license nor prohibition; but lawless mind, with unseen motives, and silent mental methods whereby it may injure the race, is the highest attenuation of evil.”
Here and there it is being said, and perhaps the wish begets the thought, that interdiction will go no further than the alcoholic abuse, and that other evils will go on, and possibly that the forbidding of the use of alcohol will sometime be overturned. But such propositions as these betray an ignorance of true prohibition, which, to repeat, is the activity of Principle, which has eternally declared its veto on all error. Liquor is merely one branch of the supposititious tree, or cause, named mortal mind. This tree has other branches, for the effect of the carnal mind claims to be infinite in variety, including medicine, superstition, sin, disease, death, and so on. These different branches, or forms, of the effect of mortal mind are being cut away very rapidly nowadays, but the mighty attack upon this seeming tree is that which is undermining its foundation, and this is being accomplished by the Word of God, the expression of omnipotence. Mrs. Eddy writes of this on page 37 of “Miscellaneous Writings,” where she says: “Christian Science lays the axe at the root of the tree. Its antidote for all ills is God, the perfect Mind, which corrects mortal thought, whence cometh all evil. God can and does destroy the thought that leads to moral or physical death. Intemperance, impurity, sin of every sort, is destroyed by Truth.”
With Principle more and more perceived, the enforcement of laws against interdicted material practices must become increasingly rigid and uncompromising, and yet unfolding to mankind infinitely true freedom. Principle, the one cause, originates only good, which it sustains and upholds with the knowledge that the perfection of Mind is the allness and oneness of being. Spirit knows but one unfettered boundless law, or activity, proceeding from itself perpetually, always effective and never evaded or mocked. A man can be calm and confident in the face of any seeming attempt at lawlessness, or absence of law, and assist in eliminating the phenomena by intelligent knowing of the supremacy of Mind.
That prohibition is a higher mortal experience is seen in the closing, or the emptiness of prisons, for the first time since the date of their erection, which in some cases goes back a century or more. It is the sign of Emmanuel, or, as Jesus said: “I was in prison, and ye came unto me.” And, of course, the closing of jails is but one of the results which will follow the elimination of alcohol. Not the least of these effects is the clearing of the minds of men, that they may be prepared to cope with more subtle drunkenness, which is fast coming to the time when it, too, will be prohibited.
It was natural that the land in which Christian Science was discovered in 1866 should lead the nations in embodying permanent prohibition as a part of its fundamental law. The gift to the world in this era of the Christian Science textbook, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” by which the “sea” is to be turned into “dry land,” fulfills the prophecy of the Revelator, who writes of the “mighty angel” that “he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth.” From this will follow “a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.” Right where the stormy waters of mortal appetites, pains and troubles seem to be there is Mind and its perfect idea, a fact revealed in divine Science. Of the part played by this teaching in bringing about the elimination of liquor, Mrs. Eddy writes on page 297, of “Miscellaneous Writings”: “Taking into account the short time that has elapsed since the discovery of Christian Science, one readily sees that this Science has distanced all other religious and pathological systems for physical and moral reformation. In the direction of temperance it has achieved far more than has been accomplished by legally coercive measures,—and because this Science bases its work on ethical conditions and mentally destroys the appetite for alcoholic drinks.”

From Extremes to Intermediate

Written for The Christian Science Monitor
December 30, 1919

THE human mind thinks in extremes: its belief in the dualism of matter and mind is represented in every part and particle of the material universe and human experience. Heat and cold, day and night, action and reaction, loss and gain, pain and pleasure, superabundance and deficiency, leisure and overwork, everywhere testify to the absence from mortal concepts of the uniform harmony of spiritual being. These opposite extremes are the inevitable manifestation of the belief that aught exists in a state of separation from God. There is no overmuch or not enough in Principle; but mortal concepts are driven back and forth between limitation and satiety, because there is no central steadfastness in materialism. “Human concepts run in extremes; they are like the action of sickness,” Mrs. Eddy writes on page 353 of “Miscellaneous Writings,” “which is either an excess of action or not action enough; they are fallible; they are neither standards nor models.”
All the friction of human existence arises from the wear upon each other of these opposing beliefs in mind and matter, good and evil. Something worthy is to be done, and belief of inability or limitation strives against the performance of it; a wrong is to be righted, and the belief that resorts to another wrong is necessary as a means somehow frustrates or delays the righting of the original wrong; comforts are needed, and a passage through a wilderness of discomforts precedes the attainment of them. The endless clash of extremes, viewed in their material aspect, presents an interminable episode of instability and falsity. More metaphysically considered, it also indicates that everywhere is felt the pressure of the demands of Principle and that the human responds to the divine in its perpetual struggle for balance and for the even distribution of benefits. The whole battle of life, consider it from any angle that you may, is simply the endeavor to gain dominion over matter and its limitations, and this virtually amounts to an effort to prove the unreality of matter.
Arrayed at one extreme of mortal belief, certain groups essay to overcome conditions to which they object by using as a weapon that very belief in matter which is already responsible for their position. Labor may declare that, until its conception of equity shall be acceded to, “there shall not be a coal to warm at, nor a fire to sit before it”; but it finds that in resorting to the mortal belief in and fear of extremes of cold and heat, it penalizes itself, since it is impossible to invoke matter as power, without suffering the reactive consequences of holding that belief. It appeals to Cæsar and goes as a prisoner to Rome. It is obliged to acknowledge that the penalties and deprivations of that abstract body, the public, are its own penalties and deprivations.
The determination that, unless and until some particular concept of justice shall be established, the people shall feel the pinch of physical discomforts, of suspense and incertitude, is itself a product of the belief in the duality of mind and matter, good and evil. Temperature is as surely mental as is every other concept of the human mind. The extremes of cold and heat have no more reality than have the extremes of riches and poverty; and an appeal to one duet of extremes is powerless to remedy the wrongs of another pair of opposites. A man can overcome his fear of climatic extremes and find the intermediate of comfort exactly as he refuses to be enslaved by the evidence of the senses and, knowing that man lives and moves and has his being in God, proves that divine Principle is available to supply all that is necessary to the maintenance of comfort, spiritually understood. He thus deprives a material weapon of its supposed power and proves that man, in the likeness of God, is superior to the seasons exactly as he is superior to any other mortal belief of inequalities.
The struggle between the differing concepts of owner and workman, of which the occasional strike is but a passing symptom, may seem to be more far reaching in its effect upon society than are some other less articulate beliefs in material extremes; but this struggle is possible because, and is actually an expression of the general mortal belief that man is both material and spiritual, and that he is therefore divorced from Principle and subject, as a consequence, to the whole gamut of inequities. A tyranny of labor would be as certainly an inequality of materialism as would be the dominance of capital. The war of industry is no more and no less the struggle between materialism and the spiritual idea than was that phase of Armageddon which plunged the armies of the world into carnage and horror. The power of a right idea which halted the murderous clash of arms is the power which can still successive states of the strife of matter against Mind and reveal the universal equity of Principle. Equity is an expression of spiritual law, and is realized as men appeal to Principle, not to physical sense, for its establishment among them. Government and governed, owner and workman may alike turn to Principle, and they will find, through an understanding of it, right and coherent means of expressing that understanding in human relationships. “It is ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished’”, as Mrs. Eddy writes, “that all nations shall speedily learn and practise the intermediate line of justice between the classes and masses of mankind, and thus exemplify in all things the universal equity of Christianity.” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 181.)
If the workman believes that he is worthy of more hire than he receives, and if his conviction has for its basis the justice of Principle, his power to demonstrate the rightness of his claims in his realization of them will be commensurate with his reliance upon spiritual means to the end and his corresponding refusal to appeal to the physical senses; and the owner must just as certainly eventually find his substance and his heaven in the love that seeketh another’s good. Without divine aid, order will not come out of the clash of extremes, but, as Mrs. Eddy writes on pages 205 and 206 of Miscellaneous Writings,” “Mortals who on the shores of time learn Christian Science, and live what they learn, take rapid transit to heaven,—the hinge on which have turned all revolutions, natural, civil, or religious, the former being servant to the latter,—from flux to permanence, from foul to pure, from torpid to serene, from extremes to intermediate.”

Harvest Time

Written for The Christian Science Monitor
December 31, 1919

HARVEST time has ever been a fitting occasion for rejoicing. The harvest gathering is a theme favored by painter and poet, portraying the gratitude of the workers upon completion of their season’s labor. It is therefore little wonder that even in the dawn of the world’s history the Jews had already set aside a special time to celebrate the feast of the harvest, the first fruits of their labors, and that the first fruits were brought into the house of the Lord as an expression of thanksgiving. And this observance of the feast of the harvest is commemorated by the Jews to this very day. In a like manner, Thanksgiving Day has come to be celebrated during the autumnal season, commemorative of God’s bounty.
Now, everybody at all familiar with the thought of the inspired writers knows full well that the time of the first fruits and the harvest was recognized by these men as of deeper significance than that attached to the more material gain represented. Harvest time was not alone one of thanksgiving, but served as an occasion to turn men’s thoughts to the goodness of God, the source of all supply, the Giver of all good and perfect gifts. Further than this, the harvest time was recognized as a particularly appropriate occasion for pointing out the fundamental, though elementary, rules for right living. Thus it was early seen that true religion must be one of works, and not of words alone. Deeds of love and of charity were urged upon these simple men by commanding them that on the day of harvest they should not wholly reap the corners of their fields, nor gather the gleanings of the harvest, for these were to be left for “the poor and the stranger.” Moreover, they were reminded of the commandments, including the injunction not to hate our brother in our heart, nor to avenge nor bear any grudge against our neighbor, but to love our neighbor as ourself.
Again, today, obedience to these commands is urged upon us, and what is more essential, Christian Science is showing how this is attainable. For, to the student of Christian Science, the harvest time signifies fruitage, that is to say, the outcome of the application of the absolute and inscrutable law of God, symbolized in the Bible declaration that as we sow shall we also reap, and in the measure that we mete it shall be measured unto us. This truism, that like begets like, is well illustrated in the Bible imagery showing the impossibility of gathering figs from thistles, and of sweet waters flowing from a fountain at the same time as bitter. And likewise we see that in so far as humanity sows to the flesh, entertains material thoughts, argues for the reality of sin, sickness and death, it will reap corruption, materiality and its attending evils. And contrariwise, in proportion as we sow to the Spirit, as we adhere to the truth of being, to the everpresence and reality of God as divine Principle or Mind, we shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.
All of this points to the basic fact that there is a fundamental law governing the universe including man, a first and only cause, infinite Mind, divine Principle, operating without variableness neither shadow of turning. It is humanity’s failure to learn and apply this simple truth that is responsible for all the evil and disaster that has beset mortals throughout the ages. Mary Baker Eddy discovered that all is infinite Mind, which is Love, and Mind’s infinite idea, which manifests love. Humanity is slowly yielding to the fact that, this being true, then obviously a belief of many minds in matter is utterly false and the result of ignorance and false teaching. The freedom that comes from the study and practice of Christian Science is the natural outcome of appropriating this eternal fact, the allness of Mind, in all our ways and perceiving what was really meant by Paul when he insisted that we must work out our own salvation. Christian Science is showing us that salvation can only be attained through the purification of thought, through the destruction of all belief in matter and the gain of spiritual understanding, by right living, not by dying. It insists further that now is the time. In Mrs. Eddy’s own words: “‘Now,’ cried the apostle, ‘is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation,’—meaning, not that now men must prepare for a future-world salvation, or safety, but that now is the time in which to experience that salvation in spirit and in life.” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 39.)
We should and do reap the harvest of what we sow, here and now, and furthermore, we can gain nothing by the vicarious efforts of others, for we gather in the precise measure of that sowing. We are learning and partaking of heaven, harmony, freedom from the bondage of the material senses, only as we plant good seed, as we elevate our thoughts from the testimony of corporeal sense and cease to sow seeds of hatred, malice and animality. For, in the words of the Apostle to the Gentiles, “The fruit of the Spirit,” of entertaining angels or God’s thoughts, “is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.”
Hence it is clear that the real harvest is of God’s planting, and no element of time enters into this process; this harvest is ever being gathered in the fullness of the present. As Mrs. Eddy has most concisely put it in the concluding lines of “Seedtime and Harvest” (Unity of Good, pp. 11 and 12), “Jesus required neither cycles of time nor thought in order to mature fitness for perfection and its possibilities. He said that the kingdom of heaven is here, and is included in Mind; that while ye say, There are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest, I say, Look up, not down, for your fields are already white for the harvest; and gather the harvest by mental, not material processes. The laborers are few in this vineyard of Mind-sowing and reaping; but let them apply to the waiting grain the curving sickle of Mind’s eternal circle, and bind it with bands of Soul.”

The Day of Good Resolutions

Written for The Christian Science Monitor
January 1, 1920

ONE of the most serious obstacles to the world’s advancement has been its belief in time. This is easy enough to understand when it is realized that time is the human mind’s method of registering its self-imposed limitations. Thus a large section of humanity has confined its religious efforts to Sunday, whilst another large section is possessed with a belief that evil is much more powerful than good. It is in just this way that people make their good resolutions, and on the first failure to live up to them renounce them as beyond their strength. And the great day of good resolutions is the first of every new year.
New Year’s Day dawns on a Christendom whose fields of thought are planted with good resolutions: New Year’s night comes down over these fields in which the seeds have already largely perished of neglect. Christ Jesus himself drew some such picture of men’s efforts to attain spirituality in his parable of the sower; and what he said is, of course, as true today as on the day on which the words were spoken. It should be the effort of every professing Christian so to order his thought that the carnal human mind may vanish in that metaphysical understanding of Principle comprehended in the Mind that was in Christ Jesus. Before this consummation can be reached, however, the struggle between the flesh and Spirit must be engaged upon, and, in the course of this struggle, there is nothing to discourage the individual because the flesh may seem at times to rise superior to his almost frail grasp on Truth. Desire and honesty will enable him to push forward in spite of every stumble. As Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 21 of Science and Health, “If the disciple is advancing spiritually, he is striving to enter in. He constantly turns away from material sense, and looks towards the imperishable things of Spirit. If honest, he will be in earnest from the start, and gain a little each day in the right direction, till at last he finishes his course with joy.”
The incentive, then, to a man’s progress is his desire: the test of his desire, his progress. If his desire is strong enough failure will not hold him back, for every failure will only supply an experience to be utilized in the next effort to advance. Thus when the good resolutions of the new year are broken, there is nothing whatever to be discouraged over. The victory over the flesh has never been gained at a bound. Abraham, in spite of the warning of Sodom, lied to Abimelech; Moses, forgetting Egypt and the Red Sea, struck the rock in his own name. Is it any wonder, then, that Paul should have groaned, “For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do,” or that Philipp Schwarzerde should have discovered that a change of name did not constitute a change of nature, and should have been driven to confess that “Old Adam is too strong for young Melanchthon”? Abraham and Moses, Paul and Melanchthon pushed forward, however, no matter what the discouragement or sense of failure, so that, in the end, the victory doubtless was with them all, and Paul’s agony was turned into joy, so that he could write, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.”
The sun, consequently, need not set, on the day of good resolutions, leaving anybody with a sense of failure or of disappointment. It is true that, according to human calculations, failure breeds failure; but this is not the law of Principle but a travesty of that law. The law of Principle knows no variation, in it is no “shadow of turning.” If, therefore, a man fails in his good resolutions, he knows, in the degree of his knowledge how to correct his failure. “O wretched man that I am!” cried Paul, “who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” but he immediately proceeded to explain, to the Romans, to whom he was writing, that he was entirely undeceived by the passions of the flesh, and knew perfectly well how to gain the ultimate victory by appealing from the wakedness of the flesh to the omnipotence of the Mind that was in Christ Jesus. The real man, he pointed out to his readers, was always subject to the law of God, it was only the human counterfeit which was obsessed by the physical senses. The entire passage has been admirably rendered by a famous Grecian: “Alas and alas for me! who shall rescue me from the obsession of the body, from this living death? Thank God!–oh, I thank God that He does: He does it through the agency of Jesus, our Messiah, our Lord! Ah well, then, in my true self, in my will, I am thrall to the Law of God: it is but in my animal nature that I am thrall to the law of sin.”
The mistake then of making good resolutions on the New Year is simply that of settting aside one day as more potent than another for that purpose. It is the mistake which has led to the human disaster of limiting divine service to one day in seven, as if the service of Principle could ever come to an end without calamity to the person concerned. Good resolutions should be formed perpetually and adhered to with all the loyalty of the individual’s understanding of Truth, even if his animal nature should, at on time or another, repudiate them. If this is done, the periods of repudiation will grow further between, so that every one who is true to his vision of the Christ, will ultimately finish his course with joy. As Mrs. Eddy writes on page 10 of “Miscellaneous Writings,” “The good cannot lose their God, their help in times of trouble. If they mistake the divine command, they will recover it, countermand their order, retrace their steps, and reinstate His orders, more assured to press on safely. The best lesson of their lives is gained by crossing swords with temptation, with fear and the besetments of evil; insomuch as they thereby have tried their strength and proven it; insomuch as they have found their strength made perfect in weakness, and their fear is self-immolated.”

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