| We claim what we want and we get what we claim. When we hear this for the first time it offends us because it brings the burden of guilt directly upon ourselves. When men no longer have a personified power of evil to blame what will they do? If we take the devil out of the picture and do no have him there to carry our alibis we will have nothing behind which to hide. We have always hidden behind the idea that there is an evil power working against the power of good, and because of that other power it is impossible for us to be free to live always in the light of God's Love. Because men have felt that they were subject in some degree to this second power it seemed impossible for them always to do the constructive thing. Hiding, they were not willing to face the issue.
Today we must return, or perhaps, come for the first time to the belief in one power, and that power God, or good. There can be no other. We are told throughout the Bible that we should have no other God before Him, yet man instinctively brings evil forward and thinks of it in terms of equal power with good.
It is true there are inversions of good. It is true there are many things which seem to us to be directly the opposite of good. And they are. They are complete inversions of good, but they are still the same power operating. They are that power working in reverse. We are but seeing the negative aspect, as we see the negative and positive expressions of electricity. We know there are not two powers just because we see two expressions of it. We know if we cross the negative pole we will be hurt. The negative pole represents evil, the opposite of the positive pole, or good. As a rule we believe it is only when we touch or cross the negative pole, or evil, that we are hurt. But on reflection we know that if we cross the positive pole we will be hurt, also, even though the positive pole represents good.
I don't suppose there is anything which brings us such great suffering as a wilful disregard of Divine guidance when we refuse to move with the current of Divine wisdom and deliberately move against that current. We cross the positive pole and we suffer and it is not evil that has caused the suffering. We cannot break God's laws any more than we can break the law of gravity when we step out of a second-story window. We disobey God's laws, we don't break them. In disobeying them they break us. The things which befall us are the things which we, not understanding, bring upon ourselves. One of the things which we have least understood is the power of our words. We have bound ourselves by the chains of our own beliefs.
- Rebecca Beard (author) | 
