Day 22: The Hand of Love

35:30-37:31

Mary Baker Eddy explains the sin and punishment in this reading. Justice is the handmaid of mercy. If you sin, you will be punished in order to learn to mend your ways. Once sin ends, the suffering ends.

This argument (to me), until a few years ago, seemed a hard sell. Then I had kids.

Now I identify with her follow-up statement and understand the whole argument:

It is useless to suppose that the wicked can gloat over their offences to the last moment and then be suddenly pardoned and pushed into heaven, or that the hand of Love is satisfied with giving us only toil, sacrifice, cross-bearing, multiplied trials, and mockery of our motives in return for our efforts at well doing.

2010

Day 270: Cain & Abel

540:25-542:26

I never did like the story of Cain and Abel. It is a childhood disagreement taken to an extreme. We want to teach our children (and people in general) to love then we, as Christians, start with these awful stories from the Bible.

Mary Baker Eddy points out two jobs of Truth:

• Truth, through her eternal laws, unveils error.
• Truth causes sin to betray itself, and sets upon error the mark of the beast.

Then she lists what happens if error is shirked:

The avoidance of justice and the denial of truth tend to [1]perpetuate sin, [2]invoke crime, [3]jeopardize self-control, and [4]mock divine mercy.

This list makes me think MBE probably observed a lot of children because this is exactly what a child does.

Day 197: Good Health & Justice

389:13-391:6

In this reading, Mary Baker Eddy says to argue against sickness and deny it’s legitimacy as you would sin:

Let your higher sense of justice destroy the false process of mortal opinions which you name law…

I like the idea of a higher sense of justice as part of spiritual growth. She goes on to give some specific steps:

Dismiss it with an abiding conviction that it is illegitimate, because you know that God is no more the author of sickness than He is of sin.

And:

Rise in the conscious strength of the spirit of Truth to overthrow the plea of mortal mind, alias matter, arrayed against the supremacy of Spirit.