Purification

The following articles were a point of argument in The Great Litigation. The Board of Directors did not want these Articles available to the Public.

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Purification

Written for the Christian Science Monitor

A Collection of Home Forum Page Articles from 1918

The following articles were originally published under the authority of Mary Baker Eddy’s 1898 Deed of Trust by the Trustees of the Christian Science Publishing Society. Frederick Dixon is attributed to be the author. The Trustees were Herbert Eustace, David B. Ogden and Lamont Rowlands. The first three articles were mentioned in the Great Litigation.

Lusting Against Lust

Written for the Christian Science Monitor

Saturday, June 15, 1918

GENERIC man, in Christian Science, is the full image and likeness of God, divine Mind, and is reflected in an infinity of greater and lesser ideas and their identities, the sum total of which combine to make up the infinite spiritual idea or generic man. It is thus that Mrs. Eddy writes, on pages 258-9 of Science and Health: “Through spiritual sense you can discern the heart of divinity, and thus begin to comprehend in Science the generic term man. Man is not absorbed in Deity, and man cannot lose his individuality, for he reflects eternal Life; nor is he an isolated, solitary idea, for he represents infinite Mind, the sum of all substance.”

Now just as God, good, is counterfeited in devil, evil, so spiritual man is counterfeited in physical man, and all divine ideas and their identities in material ideas and their identities. For instance, Rousseau declares that the greatest enemy of the human race was the man to whom it first occurred to put a ring fence round a piece of ground, and to announce, “This is mine.” Without Truth a lie could not impose itself upon mankind, without spiritual substance there could be no counterfeit material universe. The Psalmist understood this when he sang: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein;” and the writer of the wonderful drama of Job understood it, when he caused the Lord to answer out of the whirlwind, in the words: “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail?” What, of course, Rousseau, in his halting, metaphysical way, was striving to imply was that the first person to whom the idea occurred, or the first person at any rate who succumbed to it, that he could inclose a little bit of the earth’s surface as his very own, and pin up on the nearest tree a notice to the effect that trespassers would be prosecuted, was the archetype of the spirit of selfishness which was to cause so much trouble in the world. So much, indeed, that, century after century, man would fight man, and nation would contend with nation, for possession of this particular expression of the fullness of the Lord.

Rousseau, it need scarcely be said, was far too much of a materialist to see whither his own words were tending, and even the philosophers who followed him, starting from a material basis, lost themselves inevitably in a Sahara of material conclusions. Nor was it until Mrs. Eddy, returning to the spiritual premises of Jesus the Christ, showed mankind the basal error of its philosophic and scientific syllogisms, that the light of the First Century began again to penetrate the darkness of material logic. Mrs. Eddy explained to the world what the poetry of the Psalms and the drama of Job really meant, the conclusion toward which the Cyclopean Rousseau was merely groping round his cave. She showed that the first land owner had created not merely a land or an economic question, but had attempted to corral a portion of the fullness of divine Principle, in short that he was attempting to establish a self apart from God, and that in so doing he was merely engaged in reiterating, all unconsciously, the words of that wonderful letter to the “foolish Galatians,” “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”

The term lust is, indeed, one of those words which have unfortunately been narrowed down to their meaning to a specific phase of sensuality. Yet it really covers the whole gamut of the desires of the senses, and this is shown by the fact that the translators of the Old Testament used it as an alternative to soul in their renderings of the Hebrew word, nephesh, itself instinct with the very incarnation of animal propensity. In English the word originally meant sensuous pleasure, and so came to mean action or desire of a vehement or even inordinate nature. And thus the vehemence of Spirit’s battle with the flesh has merged itself into the flesh’s inordinate desire for the gratification of its sexual appetite, for the simple reason that this particular appetite sums up the whole of the lusts of the flesh, inasmuch as it is the expression of the human mind’s method of perpetuating animal birth upon the planet. From this it becomes easily cognizable that birth, and death constitute the opposite ends of the very finite stick known as human life, and how fear is, in consequence, the very expression of this belief of life and death. The belief in an end necessitates the belief in a beginning, and it is impossible to separate the one from the other. Inordinate desire, then, or lust, is fear, since it is the expression of the human mind’s effort to perpetuate the evidence of its own being, combined with its terror of extinction. This, therefore, is why it contains all the seeds of disease, and why healing must, as a consequence, always be a process of mental purification. And so Mrs. Eddy has written on page 411 of Science and Health: “Always begin your treatment by allaying the fear of patients.”

This allaying the fear of patients is, in scientific terms, what the Bible means by acquiring a clean heart, a pure heart, or a new heart. It is the destruction, through the lusting of Spirit against the flesh, of the old theological belief that the image and likeness of God, Spirit, is a human being, and the recognition instead, of the fact that this human being is the counterfeit of the real man, the image and likeness of God. The writer of the Fourth Gospel put this with surprising clarity when he explained that spiritual man was born “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God;” and, again, when he insisted, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” There is no transition, that is to say, from the flesh to Spirit. The human sense of a man is a material misconception of man, who is a divine idea, reflecting the character of the divine Mind, and born “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” It was Jesus’ perpetual lusting against the will of the flesh, that gradually destroyed his vision of the flesh, through his vision of the real man or the Christ. It was Mrs. Eddy’s vision of the Christ that showed her the secret of Jesus’ teaching, and taught her how to write, on pages 476-7 of Science and Health: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick.”

The Lust Of Power

Written for the Christian Science Monitor

Saturday, June 22, 1918

EVERY evil thing in this world comes from some misunderstanding of generic man, ultimating in a belief of a self apart from God. The materialist believes that the human being, endowed with human intelligence, represents dominion. The Christian, reading perpetually the words of the Fourth Gospel, “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do,” promptly appropriates all the honor and glory of his successful actions as the result of his own genius or industry, though he is commonly quite willing to explain away his unsuccessful ones. Now if the materialist or the Christian had only understood that the human being is only an effect, governed by a mental cause, he would have begun to understand, at the same time, the meaning of the very simple words of Jesus, and so the equally simple explanation of life which has been a sealed book to the materialist throughout all the ages.

What Jesus clearly meant was that man had no volition of his own, which enabled him to act independently of God, divine Mind, but that he was entirely subject to divine causation. Indeed, as if to place this quite beyond any misunderstanding, he immediately reiterated his declaration, in the slightly different words, “for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.” And these sayings Mrs. Eddy has driven home in a memorable sentence on page 170 of Science and Health, “Spiritual causation is the one question to be considered, for more than all others spiritual causation relates to human progress.” This is most undoubtedly true, for so long as a man imagines that he is engaged in a struggle, in which his intelligence is pitted against the forces of nature, he is bound to claim and accept the credit of his success, and to lust more and more after the power that gives him that success. But as he comes to understand better the Science of being, he begins to grasp the scientific fact of generic man, and to see why Jesus taught all mankind to pray to “our Father,” and why he explained that a grain of faith, of the faith born of an understanding of God and man, Cause and effect, would move mountains.

Now a man’s lust for power is necessarily based on the belief that the acquisition of power will bring the lusts of the flesh within his grasp. It is, for instance, only the distraught mind of the miser that accumulates gold to hoard; the ordinary healthy materialist pursues gold for the power it gives to him to purchase his desires. The moment, however, an understanding of generic man is acquired, the lust for personal power is overwhelmed in the vastness of the conception which scientifically explains the relations of all divine ideas in their perfection of quality and of harmony. In reference to which, Mrs. Eddy, writing, on page 361 of Science and Health, of Jesus’ claim to the sonship of God, continues, “This declaration of Jesus, understood, conflicts not at all with another of his sayings: ‘I and my Father are one’-that is, one in quality, not in quantity.”

What it means is, of course, that generic man, being the full reflection of the divine Mind, includes the spiritual reality of the entire universe. This is spiritual creation, of which Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 502-3 of Science and Health: “There is but one creator and one creation. This creation consists of the unfolding of spiritual ideas and their identities, which are embraced in the infinite Mind and forever reflected. These ideas range from the infinitesimal to infinity, and the highest ideas are the sons and daughters of God.” Now it is perfectly clear that, if the teaching of Jesus is correct, every spiritual idea, whether it reflects the greatest or the least quantity of the divine Mind, in that it reflects that Mind at all, reflects perfection, as explained by Paul, when he wrote, “For in him we live, and move, and have our being.” From this it is clear that in the spiritual kingdom there is no power but the power of divine Mind, and that this power is scientifically reflected, as Mrs. Eddy points out, always in an equality of quality, and differs only in quantity according to the extent of the reflection of Mind.

The very existence, however, of Truth predicates the possibility of a lie which being ipso facto, a negation, is necessarily purely supposititious. The fact of good, personified after the manner of the East as God, presupposes a purely supposititious evil, personified as devil. In this way Principle, God, may be counterfeited in the whole gamut of discord. Spirit may be counterfeited in matter, and Science, in human speculation. Jesus, as usual, summed this up when he said of the Christ, or real man, that he was the son of God, and of the unreal man, or the human being, that he was of his father the devil, evil. But inasmuch as the counterfeit, in its departure from harmony, necessarily reflects inharmony, the human being repudiating the scientific fact of equality of quality strives or lusts against Truth, in the effort to acquire some reflection of the material senses which its neighbor has not attained.

The whole theory, then, of material power is based upon an ignorance of Truth, which presents the ideal of a self apart from God, Principle, which is, by reason of this, out of Principle, out of harmony and so dependent on this inharmony for expression. This inharmony necessarily takes the form of a repudiation of infinity, in a belief of limitation. For it is surely obvious that if there were no limitation man would necessarily lust in vain for a power in excess of that of his neighbor. When, however, limitation in one thing is admitted, it is admitted in everything. It is admitted in health equally with income, and in happiness equally with health. The only healing, then, that can destroy all or any of these false beliefs, is that knowledge of the truth which sets a man free from his own ignorance. When, that is to say, the human being gets his first, faint spiritual conception of what generic man really is, he begins to understand the vastness of the idea which finds in spiritual man the generic comprehension of the spiritual realities of all those individual men and women who are contained in the universe, including man. And these realities are the sons and daughters of God, who cannot possibly enjoy a personal power, one over the other, as the autocrat has power over the plebian, the owner over the slave. True authority, the only authority, wherever it may exist, is born solely of that higher understanding of Truth which led the populace to wonder how it was that Jesus taught with authority, and not as the scribes.

The Lust Of Money

Written for the Christian Science Monitor

Saturday, June 29, 1918

WHEN the apostle to the Gentiles wrote to Timothy that “the love of money is the root of all evil,” he stated a great metaphysical fact in the fewest and simplest of words. The full significance of the saying has rarely been grasped. Indeed, it is somewhat doubtful if it was grasped at all in the centuries between the day on which it was written and the discovery of Christian Science. For the simple fact is that whilst money to the man in the street represents pleasure or freedom, license or charity, or a hundred other things, money to the Christian metaphysician means the counterfeit of substance, and so, of life.

Looked at from the point of view of the philosophy of this world, Bacon summed the matter up with his usual conciseness, when he described riches as the baggage of virtue, explaining that he meant by that something which could not well be left behind, but which nevertheless constituted a hindrance. Such a definition, however, no matter how clever, is essentially superficial, and bears no resemblance at all to the searching analysis of the apostle. The apostle neglected unessentials for fundamentals. He realized that the struggle for money was not, at the bottom, a mere craving for the indulgence of sensual appetites, but that it was inspired by fear, the fear of death, which is the belief of life in matter. The original hunter did not go out to kill for the sake of mere amusement. He went out to kill for the sake of maintaining his belief that life had to be fed upon death, that the animal had to be sacrificed to preserve the life of the man. Gradually as the fear of starvation and death was obliterated, the element of pure sport entered into the great game of killing, until mankind generally abandoned the profession of killing to the butcher, the poulterer, and the fishmonger, and devoted themselves to sheer unnecessary killing, frequently of animals that could not be eaten, purely in the name of sport.

It has been just the same with money. First men have sought money as a means of procuring food, raiment, and shelter. As, however, these have been secured, the demand for seeming essentials has spread to the demand for obvious unessentials. The cave has developed into the castle; the dinner provided by the huntsmen into the banquet prepared by the chef; the garment of skins, for one of brocade. Nevertheless the fundamental demand is the demand of the human animal-food, clothing, and covering, and all these because they stand between the human being and his belief of death, owing to the human being’s belief of life in matter.

In those primitive days before gold, silver, copper, or paper, were glorified as “legal tender,” a man exchanged an ox for a bow, or a goat for a tent. The Phœnicians brought jet into England, and took back with them the tin of Cornwall, just as today the African exchanges his ivory for rum. In those days a man counted his riches in his herd or his flocks, his drinking vessels or his slaves, so that the wise man, who was a king in Jerusalem, has summed up in his writings the extent of all his possessions, so that he might dismiss them all as vanities. Even his human wisdom he eventually dismissed as vanity, declaring that the only riches were a knowledge of Principle, the only happiness, obedience to divine law: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”

Now the Apostle John has insisted on the fact that God is Love. It follows inevitably, therefore, that it is impossible to be afraid of Love in the ordinary sense of fear. What, then, most undoubtedly, the wise man was saying came to this: Understanding what God, Principle is, a man, not for fear of punishment by God, but from the point of view of ordinary intelligence, which assures him of the futility of denying that two and two are four, will, not less for common sense reasoning than for very love of Truth, fear to contradict the facts of Principle, and so push his life outside Principle. Thus his very effort to avoid disobeying Principle will bring him in accord with Principle, and this itself constitutes the effort to obey the law of Principle, or keep the commandments of God.

The very first of these commandments is, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” that is, thou shalt admit the existence of no other substance than spiritual substance, and of no life but spiritual life. This knowledge of the truth about the substance and Life is the salvation or safety which a man buys without money and without price, for the very simple reason that, as the writer of the Fourth Gospel says, Life eternal is a knowledge of God and the Christ, and this knowledge cannot possibly be bought with money, but has to be won by the perpetual effort of the individual to divorce all sensuality from his consciousness, and to reflect the Christ, Truth, which is his true self, in every word and deed.

But the Christ is the reality of every man and woman in the material universe. Therefore the Christ is generic man. Generic man, however, as the full reflection of divine Mind, is the reality of every phenomenon in the material universe. The reality not merely of those greater ideas, the sons and daughters of God, but of those lesser ideas or subdivisions of greater ideas and their identities, such as money, mountains, or mammals. The real man, consequently, knows all there is to know as to what money really is, and knowing this he knows that he possesses all the spiritual substance belonging to him as a divine idea.

To the human being governed by animal instincts, it is different. To him money represents the “Sesame” which will open to him all the delights of the senses-all that he is apt to regard as happiness. One thing, and, one alone, he will tell you, it will not purchase-health, but even so, he will add, it helps to mitigate the pains of ill health. Therefore he plunges madly into the race for wealth, lusting for money with all the energy that is in him. His philosophy is commonly that of Iago, “Put money in thy purse”; or even of the Roman poet, “Make money, honestly if you can, but make money.” Yet the man who yields to this temptation, sells his manhood in the act, and in his heart he knows it. He is gambling against Principle, and his eventual spiritual bankruptcy is assured. Therefore, with keen discernment the apostle wrote, “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Looking Ahead

Written for the Christian Science Monitor

Saturday, July 6, 1918

INFINITE knowledge is infinite protection. It describes the environment of generic man, or the full reflection of divine Mind, an environment from which all evil is entirely excluded, since God, as infinite good, cannot reflect evil. Now generic man is necessarily the sum of all divine ideas, whether greater or smaller, and so in himself includes the universe, for, as Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 32 of “Unity of Good,” “Spirit is the only creator, and man, including the universe, is His spiritual concept.” Generic man, then, is a synonym for the spiritual universe, which universe itself includes man when man is understood as an individual man, or one of those greater ideas which make up in their entirety the compound idea known as generic man. So that, since Mind must control all its ideas, which cannot exist without it, Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 468 of Science and Health, “The spiritual universe, including individual man, is a compound idea, reflecting the divine substance of Spirit.”

This very fact of the existence of God, or divine Mind, and His idea, the universe or generic man, predicates the supposititious existence of a counterfeit known as the devil, or mortal mind, and his idea, the material universe. This universe, according to the teaching of philosophic idealism, is the mortal or human mind, for, according to this idealism, all material phenomena are the subjective condition, or ideas, of this mind. Thus the generic man of philosophic idealism is nothing but the universe of supposititious ideas, made up of all the men, women, and children comprised in the phrase mankind.

Just, however, as spiritually generic man is compounded of those greater ideas, or sons and daughters of God, which are counterfeited in the men and women of the material universe, so each of these sons and daughters of God is in turn compounded of certain lesser ideas, which are counterfeited by the ideas which throng the individual mortal or human mind. These lesser ideas, whether spiritual or material, can, it is obvious, be reflected in varying quantity, though in unvarying quality, as Mrs. Eddy points out on page 12 of the Message for 1902 to The Mother Church: “This declaration of Christ, understood, conflicts not at all with another of his sayings: ‘I and my Father are one,’-that is, one in quality, not in quantity.” It is plain, of course, that absolute good, or divine Mind, cannot be reflected in anything but absolute good, no matter how much or how little of that good may be reflected, whether the infinitesimal or infinity. And, in precisely the same way, it is clear that absolute evil, or the mortal human mind, cannot be reflected in anything but absolute evil, that is to say whenever the evil becomes apparently less pronounced, it is not that the quality of the evil has been in any way dissipated, but that some part of the quantity has been destroyed, and its place occupied by a manifestation of eternal good. Good and evil never mingle.

It will be seen, then, that mortal mind is reflected in mortal man; and that mortal man is consequently governed by mortal mind in the exact ratio in which the reflection holds intact. But inasmuch as mortal mind is a lie about divine Mind, and mortal man a lie about spiritual man, the indestructible existence of the truth perpetually threatens the lie with destruction, and must one day accomplish this destruction. This was exactly what Jesus meant when he said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” free from the lie which is deceiving you. This truth is Christ, “the true Light,” in the words of John, “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” The Christ-man, then, is the true man, and the Christian is this Christ-man, or true man, to the exact extent in which he accepts the freedom available to him through a knowledge of the truth.

This freedom is, however, no mere academic claim, it is a scientific fact to be demonstrated, as Jesus demanded that it should be demonstrated when he said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me the works that I do shall he do also, and greater works than these shall he do: because I go unto my Father.” Now every one knows that demonstration is the result of knowledge. Therefore the demonstrations of Jesus the Christ were the result of that knowledge of the Christ, Truth, which made Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ, the only man, that is to say, whoever grasped the Christ, Truth, and demonstrated the Christ, Truth, sufficiently to be entitled to the name of the Christ. This, of course, was the goal to which Jesus was urging his followers by his command to preach the Christ, Truth, and to heal through their knowledge of the Christ Truth, and it was what Paul also was urging upon the Church in Philippi, when he wrote, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”

One thing, then, is obvious beyond all question, that a lie is never converted into a truth, but is always destroyed by the recognition of Truth. This is what Paul was saying to the Ephesians when, in that eastern phraseology which is today somewhat involved, he bade them put off the old man, the mentality of the lusts of the flesh, and put on the new man, the knowledge of the Christ, Truth, or as he summed it up exactly, “Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor: for we are members one of another.” For, in other words, we are, in reality, all sons and daughters of God, included in that spiritual universe which is generic man: all ideas in divine Mind, making up the one infinite idea, generic man and having, as Jesus said, one Father, divine Mind.

The understanding of all this does not come to a man in a day: it comes slowly as the carnal mortal mind vanishes before the light of the Christ, Truth. It is demonstrated painfully as the carnal human mind is destroyed by the knowledge of the Christ, Truth. But in a dim, yearning way, the Christian, having once seen the light, looks ahead, and struggles toward it, though through a very Slough of Despond. In this lies his protection, that, struggle as he may, the light of the world, the Christ is always ahead, leading him and guiding him forward. And in this, too, lies his protection, that he cannot rouse more opposition to Truth than the truth he knows and speaks will rouse. Thus he enjoys the peace of God that passeth all understanding.

Sincerity

Written for the Christian Science Monitor

Saturday, July 13, 1918

THERE is a well known passage, in one of Horace’s Epistles, to the effect that “Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcumque infundis acescit,” which being translated means, “Unless the vessel is clean whatever is put in it goes sour.” Now the English word sincere has been gradually evolved from the Latin sincerus or clean. Its etymology is somewhat doubtful, but of the fact anybody may satisfy himself by the simple process of referring to the half dozen words in the New Testament translated sincere, every one of which more literally means guileless, incorruptible, legitimate, capable of exposure to the light, or something of that kind. Now Mrs. Eddy warns her readers on page 338 of Science and Health, that “the dissection and definition of words, aside from their metaphysical derivation, is not scientific.” And anybody who has ever allowed himself to be fascinated by the study of etymology, but has later come to some understanding of Christian Science, knows exactly what she means, and avoids the snare. But where the evolution of a language has left the significance of a word obscure, what the King James translators rendered “not sincerely,” Tyndale “not purely,” and Wycliffe “not clenli,” it becomes what St. Paul calls legitimate, and the translators sincere, true, or faithful, to reach the scientific sense of the word.

Even so little as has been said must be sufficient to make clear to the most casual reader the depth and wealth of scientific meaning behind the word sincere. It means first and last, and all the way between, pure, and Mrs. Eddy, with that extraordinary scientific insight which distinguishes her use of words, reaches the heart of the matter unerringly, without troubling about Greek texts or English translations or versions, where she writes, on page 8 of Science and Health, “If a man, though apparently fervent and prayerful, is impure and therefore insincere, what must be the comment upon him?” Jesus supplied the comment, without beating around the bush at all, and supplied it, to the face of the elders, speaking to the multitude in the Temple Court:-“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.” After which it is not in the least difficult to see why Mrs. Eddy said, on page 9 of the Message to the Mother Church, in June, 1900, “The reformer must be a hero at all points, and he must have conquered himself before he can conquer others. Sincerity is more successful than genius or talent.”

It is only necessary for a moment to concede the tremendous value which the whole world places on the word genius to arrive at the full significance of such a statement. “Genius,” declares Lord Lytton, in an attempt to define the word, “does what it must, and talent does what it can.” Of course the ordinary writer makes use of the word genius, as he does of the word infinite, or indeed of any other word, just anyhow. That is what makes him the ordinary writer, and it is the ordinary reader’s helpless acquiescence in this which led Mr. Birrell, in a half humorous, half sardonic utterance, to inquire, What, in the name of Bodley, the public had to do with literature? But Mrs. Eddy, everyone who has ever read her intelligently knows, is a very extraordinary writer, choosing her words with the scientific exactness with which words were chosen before her by the writer of the Fourth Gospel. Therefore, when, in what the world calls the struggle for existence, but which she would no doubt more wisely term the struggle for Truth, Mrs. Eddy says that sincerity counts for more than genius, it is because she perceives that sincerity is the expression of Truth, is indeed, the purity resulting from the knowledge of Truth, which frees a man by assuring him that Life is spiritual and not material.

The recognition of the fact that life is spiritual lays the foundation for the demonstration of the fact, and, to the extent of the completeness of the demonstration, lusts against lust, and so battles with all animal propensities, for all animal propensities grow out of the belief that life is inherent in matter. If, that is to say, a man did not believe that life was generated physically, he would lose his fear of the loss of human life, his anxiety in the face of sickness, and his incitement to all the sins indulged in for the gratification of physical appetites and the protection of material existence. The death of fear would entail the death of death, and the death of death would necessarily mean the death of all impurities, of the entire gamut of Paul’s “works of the flesh,” which are these: “Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings and such like.” Everyone of these is a concomitant of life in matter, and the triumph of purity, the knowledge which made possible the birth of Jesus, would overwhelm them. But human genius would not do this, for human genius is a possible concomitant of every one of them. How true, therefore, was the saying of Mrs. Eddy’s that “sincerity is more successful than genius.”

Now the very fact that sincerity is purity makes true sincerity devoid of fear, since fear is the very expression of the belief of life in matter. Would a man be guilty of any of the works of the flesh, if he did not believe in the existence of life in matter? Obviously he would not. And it is just because he believes in life in matter that he is capable of fear, which is only an acceptance of suffering in the flesh. The more sincere, in consequence, a man is, the more completely he must rise superior to fear. Therefore Mrs. Eddy very truly writes, on page 410 of Science and Health, “Christian scientific practice begins with Christ’s keynote of harmony, ‘Be not afraid!'” Adding on the succeeding page, “Always begin your treatment by allaying the fear of patients.” If you are successful in this, you will calm the fear of your patient resulting from his and the world’s belief in the existence of life in matter. “If”, Mrs. Eddy continues, “you succeed in wholly removing the fear, your patient is healed.” But the measure of your success will be the measure of your own purity; the measure, that is to say, of your sincerity.