The Eternal Mercy

IN the Lamentations of Jeremiah God’s mercies are recalled, and it is written of them, “They are new every morning.” Tender and clear, like the early shining of the morning dew, the lovingkindness of the Lord springs anew with each awakening, in that heart which turns to Him for all that the day may bring forth. A new day has such wondrous possibilities; it holds such untried opportunities for knowing and being and doing all that is good; it unfolds so many unstained hours in which to correct yesterday’s mistakes and to profit by yesterday’s lessons, that psalmist and prophet and poet have found in it a beautiful type of the renewal of all that is beautiful and true. As the new morning follows each night, so renewed consecration and endeavor may follow every season of sorrow, oppression, or failure, and no experience is so severe but that its night passes and its morning breaks, whensoever thought turns without reservation to God for deliverance and enlightenment.

Christian Science teaches that God is not changeable, sending His mercies because besought therefor, or withholding them at will from those who fail to please Him, but rather that God is loving and good to all, sending His rain, the Master tells us, “on the just and on the unjust,” and making “his sun to rise on the evil and on the good.” Though His manifestation is veiled to material sense, God’s mercies, God’s tenderness, yea, the actual presence and power of God, is everywhere present, showering blessings in abundance upon all. Whence, then, the night of sorrow, the season of sin, the continual besetments of discord which seem to entangle the footsteps and sadden the heart of mortal man? The ages have sought in vain for an explanation of the evil, and to that sense which sees and believes evil, evil clamors that it must have had a beginning, and that any philosophy which accords it not origin and presence is faulty. Conversely, to that consciousness which sees not and knows not evil, no sense of its original inception or present existence can be suggested.

God’s eternal mercy, made manifest in evil’s provable unreality, is the rich inheritance which Christian Science unfolds to the world through its text-book, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mrs. Eddy. No one who walks upon the earth to-day can say that, in effect, evil does not exist to him, so far as his material experience is concerned; but he can perceive, through the invincible logic of Mrs. Eddy’s statements, that evil does not exist to God, for God is revealed as a purely good consciousness, by which and in which evil cannot be conceived nor discerned. Even the human situation illustrates this impossibility of thought’s comprehension (embrace) of opposite qualities. The innocent heart sees purity everywhere, knowing not the nature of impurity; the truthful man is prone to believe his fellow-men are equally truthful, and is persuaded otherwise only by sharp experience; the kind expect kindness, the loving and gentle are incapable of brutality; while, on the other hand, low standards and unworthy motives see no higher than their own level, and deny the possibility of anything beyond their own measurement. To the pure “all things are indeed pure,” and to sullied thinking all things seem soiled. To God, the all-wise and all-good, evil exists not at all; but to mortal man, in his present environment, evil seems present and insists that it must be accounted for.

The only way whereby man may find the “sure mercies” of God, presents itself in the possibility of exchanging the material belief which claims an originated and developed evil, for the understanding of the Mind which was in Christ Jesus. The phenomena of the Christ-mind are purely good; the phenomena of the so-called carnal mind are entirely evil; and this, because Mind, as causation, puts forth its own kind or quality as effect. Therefore, the individual who abandons carnal thinking and cultivates Christlike thinking, refusing to entertain any evil picture about mankind, must thereby enter a new mental area, wherein new phenomena become apparent to him. This loss of evil and gain of good, through the exchange of wrong thinking for right thinking, is Christian Science demonstration. A mortal may be humanly good, in his own conduct, and yet fill his thought with many un-Christlike concepts concerning what his fellow-men are doing. Such thoughts, even in their passing, are evil in nature, and unfit for one who would be Christlike. If the evil which is shut out from God’s reflection can sometime, in the climax of salvation, be put entirely away from human thinking, we will then “be satisfied” in knowing it not, either in so-called origin or development.

Certain it is that every man should be wide awake, and know that right-mindedness actuates him in every thought and act, thus determining his views, judgments, convictions, and hence his conduct. Step by step, one thought at a time, in patience, repentance, and renewed trying, every man may reject the tyranny of mortal sense and yield to the glorious unfolding of the divine will. The whole situation is expressed in Jesus’ statement, “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” Human reason may be unable to grasp at once the question of the unreality of evil in its full scope, but he who does the will of God is keeping with the rules given in Christian Science, will step by step prove evil’s nothingness, by conquering it from the standpoint which declares its unreality, and thereby growing into a satisfying and abiding knowledge of the “doctrine” of its unreality.

If we were governed wholly by the Mind of Christ to-day, with no sense of any other, evil would not exist to us. Could all people in this age come at once into this Christly consciousness, evil would not even seem to exist to any one. It is undeniable that evil never did exist to this Christ-consciousness, else its Christliness would be impaired, and the “Mind of Christ” could offer no refuge from evil’s storm and destruction. As Mrs. Eddy has fully explained in “Unity of Good,” page 80, the one logical way of salvation provides that a growing knowledge of good shall deliver men from evil; and to make this possible, evil must be foreign to good, unsupported by it, unknown to it, and entirely outside its activities.

One difficulty in understanding this arises from believing that man can think both good and evil thoughts. This wrong view will be corrected as we come to understand that good thoughts cannot embrace evil, and evil thoughts cannot comprehend good. Good thoughts think about good things, in a good way, while evil thoughts picture evil phenomena, for “like produces like.” A good quality of thought understands its own kind, and remains its own kind, for its quality is unchanging. Christian Science has revealed this, and has declared that right consciousness is the real man, the only manhood there is; while evil thinking is but impersonal evil suggestion, which attempts to engraft itself upon right thinking and call itself part of man. No one can think a good and an evil thought simultaneously. They may seem to occupy the ground almost at the same instant, but close analysis always reveals them to be separate. This makes it possible for thought to cling steadfastly to good, and to build such a perfect structure of right thinking that evil finds less opportunity each day to attempt to build at all.

It is related in the book of Ezra, that “when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the children of the captivity builded the temple unto the Lord God of Israel; then they came to Zerubbabel, and to the chief of the fathers, and said unto them, Let us build with you: for we seek your God, as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto him since the days of Esar-haddon king of Assur, which brought us up hither. But Zerubbabel, and Jeshua, and the rest of the chief of the fathers of Israel, said unto them, Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God: but we ourselves together will build unto the Lord God of Israel.” Thus may every one answer evil’s offer to build with him, for right thinking is the right thinker, and by its very activity it must silence the clamor of every temptation, every weakness, every assault. Every Christian Scientist can thus protect his thought-processes from evil’s subtle suggestion, “We seek your God, as ye do,” and guard his analyses, his conclusions, and his habits from any attempted intermixture of erroneous belief. Eternal vigilance, however, is the price of this liberty. Not yet has the Christian Scientist so disentangled himself from material methods, nor so emerged from the realm of a seeming mortal self, that he can afford to relax for an instant his watchful efforts. Nevertheless, through earnest watching he begins to put on the “garments of salvation,” and thus becomes so strengthened and encouraged, because of the disappearance of evil from his thought and life, that he will be able to think more and more from the basis of the divine Mind, and rest satisfied in the knowledge that evil never had an origin, inasmuch as it has no existence to the Mind that knows only good.

To God himself, unchanging goodness is not new. His mercies are eternal, springing spontaneously from the wonder of His infinity; but to the weary traveler, toiling along this journey wherein just one good thought at a time may be appropriated, God’s mercies are indeed “new every morning.” After each night of sin, or sorrow, or struggle, there breaks a new discovery of the eternal, ever-present good. Each lofty moral summit gained and held, reveals new vistas, hitherto unseen views, of infinite Love. A very heaven of mercies, showering its blessings in unmeasured abundance everywhere, is this realm of pure spiritual thinking, this Christ-mind; and in the measure that each man lays hold upon it, and abides with it, does he find himself within its borders of peace. What counts the night of pain or sorrow, if it be a night of discovery? “Joy cometh in the morning,” and the mornings lengthen into an eternal noonday, as the unreality of evil is made more and more apparent in the expanding knowledge of the supremacy of God, until there shall be, as St. John has prophesied, “no night there.” “And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” God’s eternal mercy, made forever manifest in evil’s unreality, shall reign supreme.