The following is an article from the February 2000 issue of The Christian Science Journal

Humanity has the right to be free of every form of slavery, including fear, disease, pain.

Nathan A. Talbot

For many of us, the concept of slavery may seem distant. Perhaps we’ve read about slavery in a history book or a novel. Or we’ve see an occasional story in the newspaper describing its practice in remote parts of the world. Maybe we’ve watched a movie like the popular Amistad of a few years ago. The technical issue in the movie was an actual legal conflict over the interpretation of a treaty between the United States and Spain. But the legal incident provided a setting for the movie to illustrate a moment in the world’s gradual journey out of the practice of slavery.

While there were heart-wrenching scenes of humankind’s shameful inhumanity, there were also scenes of those who were reaching for ideals. They were struggling to win more freedom and justice for all of society. John Quincy Adams, a longtime advocate for these righteous standards, argues in the movie before the United States Supreme Court. He is portrayed as saying: "This is the most important case that has ever come before the court, because what it, in fact, concerns is the very nature of man. . . . The natural state of man is freedom."

At the time of the Amistad incident and Adam’s passionate argument in 1841, Mary Baker Eddy was hardly out of her teen years. Her health was already frail, and soon she would be moving to the South as a young bride, where she would have brief but first-hand exposure to what would become a major American struggle over slavery.

Some years after the Civil War drew to a close, she would comment in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures on the evils of slavery. But in speaking of this slavery, she pointed to something even more challenging that must be faced and defeated. She explains, "Legally to abolish unpaid servitude in the United States was hard; but the abolition of mental slavery is a more difficult task."1 As profoundly as Mrs. Eddy may have felt about the rights of people of color, her crusade for the rights of each individual on earth had to do with freedom in relation to this deeper issue. She saw African slavery as an awful injustice—a shocking deprivation of rights. And she saw a lesson in it. This kind of slavery indicated the work to be done in banishing the mental bondage from which all of humanity must escape.

Perhaps we begin to comprehend the significance of mental slavery and see how to defeat it only as we recognize and feel more of the spiritual freedom God has given us. Science and Health, in harmony with the Scriptures, reveals true existence as the outcome of God, therefore spiritual, immortal, untouched by any form of bondage. It helps us understand that God, Spirit, is perfect, that He doesn’t include an element of limitation or mortality. Each individual’s true self, then, as the beloved representation of Spirit, of divine consciousness, is perfect and whole. It is free. The Bible reveals something of this unrestricted being in its reassuring words, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." 2 Real freedom isn’t simply the absence of bonds. It’s an active, vital, invigorating spiritual quality like God-given joy or energy or inspiration. It is a progressive consciousness of divine goodness.

Broadly speaking, mortal existence might be described as a very different consciousness of reality. It is a sense of reality rooted in limitation, vulnerability, ultimately death. Being chained to such views of life in matter is a type of slavery—mental slavery. All too often human thought feels in bondage to mortality instead of feeling blessed by the liberating nature of immortality. Every individual has a divine right to break out of this mesmeric feeling of captivity to such a mentality.

Some may point to the good in mortal existence. But people have also pointed to the good that took place in the context of some benevolent slave owners. There were, of course, examples in such cases of children who were raised in nurturing families. And perhaps there were those who didn’t fully appreciate the significance of individual sovereignty. There were progressive times as well as difficult times. And yet the very essence of slavery is profoundly inconsistent with John Quincy Adam’s courtroom insight that "the natural state of man is freedom."

Mrs. Eddy calls on us to demonstrate this concept of individual freedom in a radically spiritual way; to put off—through an understanding of what God and our true identity really are—the false consciousness of life shackled by the assumption that we live in and are defined by matter instead of Spirit, the finite instead of the infinite.

Materiality itself—apart from any specific unjust conditions—is a kind of bondage. It’s mental bondage, because matter is mental. It’s the subjective state of mortal thought, even though it seems to be solid substance, distinct from thought. It is the product, or manifestation, of a mentality enslaved to the belief that existence can be held in the grip of limitation. This mortal-mindedness may believe at times that life in matter is pleasant. But it is, at best, pleasant mental slavery.

A discussion of matter’s oppressive, mental nature may sound to some like speculation about an abstract, philosophical concept. But the discovery that mental slavery is spiritually illegal can bring healing when, for instance, the body tells us it hurts. Or that it’s experiencing chronic discord. Or that it might die. When we find ourselves dominated by such a harsh master as matter, it can be immensely comforting to realize that shifting our allegiance away from matter’s supposed lordship to a love for Spirit’s justice can free us, just as it freed Mrs. Eddy from a life of semi-invalidism. We, too, have a divine right to feel our God-given well-being. There is no law that gives the body the right to fetter our health or joy. We don’t have to bow down to the body and serve it. While we dress it, feed it, rest and cleanse it, we don’t need to let it rule us. There’s no divine requirement that we follow society’s increasing emphasis on decorating the body, massaging it, medicating it, exercising it, fearing it, watching it, weighing it, flaunting it, abusing it, loving it.

Too easily the physical body, the conscious embodiment of boundaries, becomes the master and we the servant, even the slave. If the body complains, you may call it pain. You may say the body hurts. But the pain being inflicted on you is a facet of mental slavery, slavery to the belief that God’s law and love could permit suffering. Emancipation is the need. Spiritual healing is God’s way of meeting that need. While sin brings suffering until the sin ceases, God’s power destroys both sin and suffering.

Jesus, referring to the Christ, or his Godlikeness, promised, "I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you." 3 In your own pilgrimage toward freedom, you might find that promise to mean, "I will not leave you unhealed, in bondage, fearful. I will come and liberate you."

Christ, the ever-present power of God expressed in Jesus’ life and healing ministry, gives us courage and the right to rise up, to rebel and claim our freedom. Christ encourages and empowers, inspires and impels us to argue our own case—to affirm in prayer that spiritual justice prevails and that our right to well-being is God-assured.

However aggressive the body appears to be with its arguments, this liberating influence of Spirit is always present, always acting on our behalf. It is always here, nurturing our freedom. This bondage breaker, or "Spirit of the Lord," might be described as the Christ-spirit. Regardless of how the body would appear to oppress us, the Christ is here to wake us to conscious being unconfined by fear or pain.

The purpose of Christ has always been to bring release, to break bonds, "to set at liberty them that are bruised." 4 The view of existence as manacled to mortality is a devilish view, a deceptive or hypnotized view. In Bible language, we might call it the dragon view. "And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world." 5

Christ is the liberating power that exposes the deception, that invalidates this mental slavery. It reveals our true, God-given consciousness. It shows us that we are free and whole. Through divine Science, we can prove the power of Christ to break whatever fetters would bind us to the view of life in a body of matter. That’s an enslaving view of reality, and Christ frees us by enabling us to see and acknowledge the integrity of our real, spiritual being. Christ enables us to rejoice in a consciousness that embodies health and a feeling of soundness. This is our genuine identity, exempt from limitation, pain, or disease. The concept that "the natural state of man is freedom" hints at St. Paul’s insistence, "I was free born." 6

In truth, we are all born of God, free born, expressing Spirit’s liberating nature. You have this consciousness of freedom. It is your divine right to claim it—then with Christly authority, to feel and express it.

Your true consciousness of being, of body, of all reality, is not enslaved to any kind of hindrance. You do have rights. They give you the capacity to escape from being spellbound by matter. As Science and Health declares: "Discerning the rights of man, we cannot fail to foresee the doom of all oppression. Slavery is not the legitimate state of man. God made man free."7

1 Science and Health, p. 225.

2 II Cor. 3:17.

3 John 14:18.

4 Luke 4:18.

5 Rev. 12:9.

6 Acts 22:28.

7 Science and Health, p. 227.

Return to the Journal