A Holy Habitation

Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.—Psalms.

Every man’s consciousness is for him an individual dwelling-place wherein he holds communion with everything of which he is cognizant. It is through the windows of his own thought that he looks out upon an external world, or looks in upon the impressions of his own mind and heart. Each man’s thinking constitutes his own castle, furnished within by the quality of his thoughts, and open to outside invitation or attack only as the entrances are left unguarded. And the man whose trend of thought leads him upward, finds in the teaching of Christian Science that which aids him to build a mental habitation, cleansed and purified within, and fortified against all that should remain without. Ruskin has said, “To get peace, make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts.” Men have labored untiringly along all lines of development and education to provide for themselves that intellectual knowledge which enjoys all that is beautiful, true, and great; to secure dwelling-places of satisfaction for the affections; to insure habitations of ease for the senses. Yet in all this search for a secure mental stronghold, the standards may have been personal rather than impersonal, human instead of divine; and because of this there is no really holy habitation until the Master of the household, the Mind of Christ, enters and takes possession of His own.

Christian Science is teaching the men of to-day that only as mind and heart are prepared to receive this royal visitor, can He enter. What is the Mind of Christ, in nature and office, but the Mind of rightness, of righteousness? Was the Christ-idea, manifested in Jesus of Nazareth, anything other than absolute righteousness, individually expressed, to the undoing of all the sin, disease, and death with which it came in contact? Could it have been other than the perfect spiritual understanding of all things, in their relation to the infinite? The disciple knows that he cannot attain at once the altitude of Christ’ perfection, but unless he sees that he must begin to prepare his habitation by Christlike thinking, he is in no way fulfilling his discipleship.

Every Christian Scientist knows so much of his own shortcomings that he is prone to think, sometimes, that the understanding of divine Love, the Love which unselfs the affections and desires and transfigures daily thoughts and deeds, is far from him, and far from his present attainment. This may be true, but there is no Christian Scientist who cannot be faithful to-day in his effort to cast out the opposite of divine Love, just in the degree that his emotions and tendencies are uncovered to him as being unlike Love. Each man who desires to fit his mental home for God’s presence, can cease indulging un-Godlike thinking. He can stop hating; he can stop fearing; he can stop condemning, criticising, resenting. In fact, he can take all the unholy brood of evils which throng the human sense, and put them so far from him that they cease to clog his thoughts. And all this can be done, not through unstable desire, not through the will-power which seems to enable one to reform though he sin again, but through the revelation of Christian Science, which exposes the impersonality and unreality of the evil suggestions which the race has so long believed to be personal and real. Christian Science teaches its student what to think and how to think, and its first point of control is the rejection of the first wrong thought discovered under its searching analysis. Unless there be obedience upon this first point, the mental habitation cannot be cleansed, for the intellectual knowledge of the letter alone does not mean Christian regeneration. If there be such obedience, the Prodigal has arisen, to find his way to his Father’s house, and the Father comes out to meet him; divine Love floods the heart which prepares for Love’s coming by casting out self.

This point is well illustrated by the mental process of a student of Christian Science who finds himself hurt by the injustice, the carelessness, or the unkindness of another. One who knows nothing of Christian Science will at best be wounded and unhappy until the natural reaction of thought has changed the feeling and time has made the matter a forgotten incident. One who understands something of Christian Science, finding himself so hurt, will begin a dissection of his own thought, which will uncover the true nature of the mental elements conspiring to make him unhappy. He may find, first, that it is self-love which has been wounded. The desire to be appreciated and considered has been disappointed. Then self-pity comes to light; he is sorry for himself because he has been so treated. Wounded pride and resentment stir the hurt and loving heart to a tinge of bitterness, and perhaps criticism shows its head.; the friend should have been more thoughtful, more kind. Envy may insinuate that other people have smoother pathways. Fear adds its burden, suggestion that a friendship may be ruptured, or that some loss or sorrow may occur from the incident, and self-justification always whispers that the experience was undeserved. In the more evil natures, and under acute temptation, these mental tendencies, intensified, blaze into the activities of anger, retaliation, and revenge. This, however, is beyond our present consideration, for the loving nature which cannot be stung to such evil feeling itself, yet can suffer under the touch of a careless hand, offers sufficient field for the discovery of many of the lurking thoughts which make for unhappiness.

It requires courage to designate one’s own emotions as self-love, self-pity, envy, or retaliation, but Christian Science gives to its student just such courage. It equips him with such clear vision that he can dissect the elements of an undefined misery pulling at his own heartstrings, and lay bare the disturbing mental characteristics of his own nature. Without this analysis he would go on harboring such emotions under the head of sensitiveness and sorrow. With such analysis, he begins to clear his own mental habitation of these unworthy guests. A season of enlightened prayer will reject them all, because they have been detected in their true nature, and consequently can be intelligently handled. The Christian Scientist’s own mentality has been the scene of his battle. It is always the only arena for defeat or victory. He has rejected wrong thinking and has taken refuge in right thinking, and thus the incident which would have disturbed his peace has become a lesson in humility and patience, and a proof of the temporal nature of personal experience. That which is said or done to-day, is regretted to-morrow. The emotions of the human disposition are passing, subject to time and change in every way, and they can pass from the consciousness of the Christian Scientist just so rapidly as he ordains that they shall. His refusal to cherish them, and his righteous determination to dislodge them by the adoption of that Mind “which was also in Christ Jesus,” compasses their destruction.

When Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God,” he set forth the unfailing reward of a righteous effort. Only the conquest of all that opposes purity of heart, enables thought to grasp the power and presence of God, and the measure of the “seeing” is determined by the measure of the overcoming. Thomas a Kempis, in his work “Of the Imitation of Christ,” portrays Christ as saying, “I am the lover of purity and the giver of all sanctity. I seek a pure heart, and there is the place of my rest. If thou wilt have me come unto thee, and remain with thee, purge out the old leaven and make clean the habitation of thy heart. Shut out the whole world, and all the throng of sins; sit thou as it were a sparrow alone upon the house-top, and think over thy transgressions in the bitterness of thy soul. For every one that loveth will prepare the best and fairest place for his beloved; for herein is known the affection of him that entertaineth his beloved.”

This analysis of the right thinking which redeems one from sensitiveness and its attendant suffering, touches only one phase of human experience, but it serves to illustrate the way of deliverance from all discord. The clearness and thoroughness of this mental work bears directly upon the healing of sickness as Christian Science accomplishes it. Sickness is primarily a mental condition, for unless there be a mental recognition of the trouble, no person can be conscious of it. Though the manifestation seem to be physical it must be mentally accepted to establish itself in experience. This acceptance of disease has become universally prevalent because disease is believed to be inevitable, but Christian Science explains it as an unlawful intruder upon the rights of mankind, in that God no more upholds it than He upholds sin; and this classification stimulates thought to begin a rejection of its claims which eventually demolishes it. The rejection of individual temperamental traits, and the resistance of the minor temptations of the disposition, underlie the efforts to dispose of disease, for disease is an effect of wrong thinking, and thought must be corrected to produce a change in its phenomena. This by no means declares that every case of sickness is the direct result of some specific sin, but it does stimulate the thinker to conquer his own injurious mental habits, that he may come out from their influence and find himself free to dispose of both sin and disease under the “new dispensation” of the law of God, understood and demonstrated.

It is highly important that both practitioner and patient be alive to this demand for righting wrong thinking in every field of feeling and action. If the adjustment be confined merely to the physical question under consideration, there may be delay and disappointment; but if there be found with each individual an earnest desire to re-adjust all mental limitations and deformities which offend the law of absolute righteousness, there can be no obstruction to peace and healing. The man is not only regenerated himself, but he is protected against any lack of regeneration in his fellow-men, for he becomes a law unto himself which stays the power of others to undo him. His mental habitation is furnished within and fortified against all that lies without. It is what he accepts of good and what he rejects of evil, which makes his consciousness a sweet and holy place wherein he may rest in quietude, gathering strength and understanding in the companionship of that divine Mind which comes to him as evil goes out of him. And as this regenerating mental process proceeds day after day, thought rises gradually to the apprehension that there is really but one great mental habitation, wherein all men will eventually find their real being,—the divine Mind which is God himself. The patient rejection of the fleshly mind brings each man to know that in reality he possesses no erroneous mind of his own, for when the wrong thinking has gone there is no longer a wrong thinker, and consequently no wrong mind. Thus he finds himself a living individual idea in that great divine Mind which cherishes within itself all it has created.