You Would Not Be Afraid Of Anything If You Knew You Had Dominion Over It

Our sense of Christ Jesus and his work is that he did not come to overthrow or overturn some mighty thing that had a right to be. Not at all. He came to demolish that which had no right to exist. Surely it is not rational to suppose that Christ’s coming to do the will of God would have upset anything that God had ordained; that he would have extinguished something that was based on immortality and had immortal existence. That certainly would not have been rational or sensible; and our teaching is that his very work ought to prove to humanity and draw attention to the fact that disease and sin and insanity and fear and all of these kindred things that distress humanity are all of them illegitimate, abnormal, unrighteous, unlawful, and unnecessary. Christ’s mission is proof in our estimation of the destructible nature of the different forms of evil that harass humanity.

When Christ Jesus had finished his mission he made a wonderful declaration. It was this: “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” “Go thou and do likewise.” Note the universality of that declaration. He had not done something that was extraordinary, something that was of value only to a mere handful of people, but it was a service to humanity for all time, in attestation of the infinite nature of the divine purpose. “Go thou and do likewise.” “These things shall ye do and greater.” “I am the way.” “Follow thou me.” “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Free from what? Following in his way, doing likewise, — what does it all mean? Why, it ought to mean that you have a right to learn your way, to discover your way, to practise the way that will deliver you from the same phases of evil; and this is one of the cardinal points of Christian Science teaching. God gave man dominion over all the earth; that surely means dominion over his body, over his circumstances, his environment, and his surrounding conditions. It means dominion over every foe, over every obstacle, over everything that surges up against his life. The trouble with us is that we are afraid of everybody and everything because we do not know, never did know, that fundamentally God provided dominion for us. You would not be afraid of anything if you knew you had dominion over it; and everybody who reads the Bible has an opportunity to find upon its first pages that that is what God has given us, and we have all of us missed it until this day. We have all been, as it were, like bubbles upon the sea of capricious destiny, and ready to believe that an evil state of existence can overcome us, and abolish life, and make us sick, and kill us at any moment. We are educated to be reconciled to our own evil destiny, our own doom, and nobody has been educated to suppose that he has a right to resist, or adequately to contend against his foe.

At this point Christian Science is exciting the hope that you have a right to contend and win. You have a right to be the master of your fate. You have a right to succeed in everything that is right for you to do. You have a right to learn how to prevent disease; you have a right to learn how to cure disease; you have a right to learn how to cure poverty; and the awful strife of humanity against itself. We to-day are adrift, according to our own confession; and yet there ever rings out in the ear of Christendom this one thing, that in our Christ and his teaching and his way and his rule we are entitled to salvation, and it shall make us free.