Description
Irma Stewart takes the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes far beyond the conventional meaning of them as moral laws and reveals their deeper meaning in Christian Science. Not only our words and deeds, but our most hidden thoughts and feelings must conform to these divine laws for they open the way to the Kingdom of God within. By understanding their more spiritual meaning and obeying them subjectively, we live beyond and above the mortal dream of life in matter, for in the last analysis they do not relate to our relationship to others, but to our relationship to God. Ms. Stewart writes of the Ten Commandments: “Notwithstanding their reward and punishment clauses, these rules are so simple, so direct, and so profound that they lend themselves to a less personal and highly spiritual illumination, as readily as the recesses of a valley yield their gloom to the rising sun. “Seven of these ten rules begin with the words ‘Thou shalt not,’ and the remaining three might also create a dictatorial or arbitrary impression for the one having a humanly projected concept of Jehovah. But in the light with which the loving Christ understanding baptizes its experience, the commanding, restrictive, forbidding aspects dissolve, and the words “Thou shalt not” usher in an aurora of joyous awakening, wherein experience is bathed in a tender glow of perfection, and there is no possibility of breaking even the least of one of these commandments, nor of teaching men so to do. “In this spiritual sense of obedience there is no suggestion of an obeyer and an obeyed, because lawful conformity is a subjective experience. Doing surrenders a sense of human performance for the mental activity of being divine awareness itself; and innate oneness of perfection is confirmed by perfection. Of the Beatitudes, she writes: “A mere passing glance at the Beatitudes serves to disclose their step by step expansiveness. Each one in its spiritual signification hints of the one to follow. The first seven refer to enlightenment — to progressive illuminating inner experiences. They portray spiritual development — a revelation of the kingdom already within. They do not refer to human activity nor to a human sense of values, but indicate seven successive states of subjective ascendancy not unlike those illustrated in the opening Book of Genesis, and again in the spiritual sense of the Lord’s Prayer as given in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. . . .