Introduction
You often struggle with difficult external conditions, financial lack, poor health, or unhappy relationships, believing that your happiness depends on changing the outer world. You search for solutions in material effort, moral willpower, or dogmatic religion, yet your problems persist because you overlook the invisible laws governing your experience.
Emmet Fox demonstrates that Jesus taught a precise mental science rather than a system of theological belief. The Sermon on the Mount is a scientific manual of mental and spiritual laws that transforms your outer world by altering your inner consciousness.
You discover how your habitual thoughts dictate every circumstance of your life. The book guides you from mastering mental equivalents through the Beatitudes to practicing nonresistance and scientific prayer.
You learn to answer these fundamental questions:
- How do your hidden mental states create your outer environment?
- What precise laws govern scientific prayer and divine supply?
- Why does resisting evil only perpetuate your difficulties?
- How does true forgiveness release you from past karma?
1. The Spiritual Key and the Power of Thought
The Spiritual Key to the Bible
You must interpret the Bible and the teachings of Jesus using a Spiritual Key rather than through literalism or human-made theological systems. Historical Christianity has accumulated dogmas, original sin doctrines, and elaborate ecclesiasticism that are absent from the original teachings. Jesus taught no system of theology but delivered a purely spiritual and metaphysical science.
The Bible and the teachings of Jesus must be interpreted using a Spiritual Key rather than through literalism or human-made theological systems.
Literal-minded interpreters took the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden as a literal historical fact, leading to absurd consequences.
Jesus strictly opposed ecclesiasticism, religious hierarchies, elaborate vestments, and rigid external observances. He continually clashed with religious officials and rejected their claims to authority. He forbade his followers from adopting pretentious titles or relying on outward ceremonies, emphasizing that true religion is a matter of inner spirit rather than external rules.
Matt. 23:8 records that Jesus instructed his followers not to be called Rabbi because all are brethren.
The Secret Place of Consciousness
True spiritual seekers must dig beneath surface interpretations of the Bible just as miners dig past superficial clay into rich mineral strata. Superficial reading yields only basic discoveries, but persistent spiritual perception unlocks deeper and richer layers of truth extending infinitely.
Diamond seekers in South Africa initially found stones in the yellow clay before discovering vastly greater riches in the blue clay underneath.
To master this study, follow this practice:
- Constantly affirm that Divine Wisdom is enlightening you while reading the Bible.
The outer world has no independent character of its own and is entirely plastic to human thought. Your physical body, circumstances, and environment are the outer expression of your inner mental activity taking place within your Secret Place. Because you can choose your thoughts, you are entirely responsible for your own life experiences and destiny.
Human consciousness serves as the private cabinet or Secret Place where all outer conditions of health, wealth, and experience are originally determined. You are the absolute monarch of your own life kingdom, and whatever thoughts you choose to dwell upon will manifest in the outer physical world. The outer conditions do not cause the inner state, because cause and effect flow strictly from within to without.
2. The Beatitudes and the Laws of Mentality
The Eight Beatitudes form a metaphysical synopsis of right mental states that grant you dominion over your external life.
The Eight Beatitudes as Metaphysics
Jesus focused exclusively on general principles involving mental states rather than external ritual observances or formal rules. He understood that if mental states are right, everything else follows, which aligns with the Oriental approach found in other sacred texts. The Eight Beatitudes are not merely a set of moral ideals or impossible commandments, but a prose poem constituting a complete spiritual synopsis of Christian teaching centered on mental states.
Being poor in spirit means emptying oneself of personal self-will and renouncing preconceived opinions, intellectual pride, and fixed habits of thought in the search for God.
People find it hard to discover God not necessarily because of monetary wealth, but because of great possessions in the form of academic distinction, social prestige, and reliance on their own judgment. Fox contrasts the humble folk who received the message gladly with ecclesiastics who were weighed down by their intellectual and spiritual pride.
The Rich Young Man turned away sorrowful because he had great possessions in the form of his attachments.
Meekness is the technical mental attitude of open-mindedness and faith that gives a person the Secret of Dominion over their outer conditions and life experience. In biblical metaphysics, earth means outer manifestation or the total of one's outer experience, and meekness means a complete willingness to let the Will of God come about through Divine Wisdom rather than personal insistence. Fox cites Moses as an example of a supremely meek individual who achieved mastery and physical rejuvenation.
Moses manifested the body of a young man at one hundred and twenty years of age and ultimately dematerialized without dying.
Meekness, Righteousness, and the Pure Heart
Righteousness in the Bible means right thinking on all subjects and in every department of life, based on the law that outer circumstances are expressions of inner thoughts. Because outer things are merely resultant pictures of what goes on in the secret place of the mind, trying to change externals directly without changing thought violates the Law of the Universe. Habits of thought are deeply potent and require unceasing vigilance to redirect toward harmony.
You must engage in specific mental adjustments:
- Review your life to see if you are still pursuing wrong lines of conduct
- Identify and cut out any unforgiven grudges, political or religious hatreds, or jealousy
- Reflect as an immortal being that no good thing is out of your reach
- Stop indulging in remorse and claim the presence of God
The pure in heart are those who recognize God as the only real cause and power in every part of their mentality, which allows them to pierce through limitations and perceive reality. The heart in biblical terms corresponds to the subconscious mind. Head knowledge or mere intellectual opinion is insufficient; the truth must be accepted by the subconscious mind to alter character and life.
3. Metaphysical Practice and Nonresistance
You must tackle difficulties immediately and avoid resisting evil mentally, because thoughts are things that manifest physically.
Tackling Difficulties Early
It is much easier to overcome a difficulty immediately at its first appearance than after it has been allowed to dig itself into the mentality. An enemy army is easy to defeat in the open but hard to dislodge once entrenched. Error grows stronger the more you dwell on it, analyze it, or expect it to last for a specific duration.
A person who sneezes and immediately concludes they have caught a cold begins meditating on sickness, recalling past colds, and predicting a ten-day duration, thereby building up the error. This assumes the ten days or two weeks that people usually assign to an ordinary cold.
To prevent this outcome, you can apply Scientific Christianity and the Law of Being through specific mental steps:
- Turn the trouble out immediately upon presentation
- Repudiate the error and refuse to accept it
- Quietly affirm the Truth to give error no chance to dig itself in
Outer acts are merely the sequels to thoughts, making wrong mental states just as destructive as wrong physical deeds. Because thoughts literally are things, entertaining covetous, hateful, or lustful thoughts means committing the corresponding sin in your heart. Soul-consent to these states inevitably leads to physical manifestation given time according to Master Truth.
The Law of Nonresistance
Resisting undesirable circumstances mentally gives them power against you, whereas nonresistance causes them to crumble away. The grand secret of success is to stop hurling yourself mentally against difficulties. You must withdraw the energy of belief from the error and concentrate steadily on the Divine Presence.
A lady annoyed by bad language from repairmen outside her window overcame her anger by mentally saluting the Indwelling Christ in them, causing the offensive language to cease instantly.
To master this approach, you must practice the Affirmation and the Denial:
- Refuse to resist the trouble mentally
- Refuse to feed soul-substance into the error
- Feel out mentally for the Presence of God
- Hold thought steadily to that Presence in the person or place
Most bodily ailments and physical troubles are directly caused by allowing destructive emotions to occupy the mind. Entertaining feelings of anger, resentment, jealousy, or spite damages physical health according to natural law, regardless of whether you feel morally justified in having those feelings. The law of nature takes no account of human intentions or justifications, exactly like electricity or poison.
A woman claimed she had a right to be angry because she was the victim of shabby treatment, illustrating the common fallacy that special permission can exist to hold negative emotions without physical consequences.
4. Scientific Prayer, Supply, and Forgiveness
Scientific prayer aligns your soul with divine supply, and the Lord's Prayer provides a complete formula for soul transformation centered on forgiveness.
Prayers should not be vague or mechanical repetitions. When experiencing lack, you must treat yourself concerning that specific sense of lack by filling it with Divine Love, which causes the missing element to appear.
An author described a woman in London whose affairs were ruined; she dropped the burden mentally, spent days reading the Bible and praying for peace, and everything cleared up within a week without material action.
The Practice of Scientific Prayer
Scientific prayer requires concentrating definitively on specific current needs and treating the soul concerning any sense of lack. You can apply this method directly to your daily spiritual work:
- Stop and go away if prayers become mechanical or waterlogged, and return later with a fresh mind.
- Concentrate prayers upon whatever you wish to demonstrate at the moment rather than treating only for general harmony.
- Satisfy the sense of lack within yourself with a sense of Divine Love.
- Work on future or past problems in the present tense because the thought of them is present in consciousness.
The Lord's Prayer is a carefully constructed organic formula consisting of seven clauses designed for the systematic development and transformation of the soul. Constructed by Jesus to withstand distortion through the ages, it serves as a universal common denominator for Christianity. Its seven clauses correspond to individual completeness, safely carrying the entire Christ message without attracting the distortion of man-made theological systems. You should make a point of using the Lord's Prayer intelligently and regularly every day.
God's name or nature is hallowed, meaning whole, wholesome, and healed, which proves that God is never the author of sickness or trouble. Since cause and effect must be similar, a perfect God cannot cause sickness, accidents, or death, because these are unlike His nature. You must stop attributing your difficulties to God, as doing so gives power to your troubles and hinders healing.
True supply encompasses everything needed for a healthy and harmonious life, and God must be recognized as the sole source rather than secondary channels. Bread in the Lord's Prayer includes food, clothing, shelter, travel, books, and freedom. People often mistake their job, business, or investments for the source of supply, whereas these are only channels. Because change is the cosmic law, a specific channel may fade, but relying on God as the unchangeable source ensures a new channel will always open.
The inner meaning of daily bread is the actual realization and conscious experience of the presence of God. Realization is distinct from mere theorizing, intellectual discussion, or fine words, serving as the true nourishment of the soul just as physical food nourishes the body. Trying to live upon yesterday's realization is spiritual death; contact with God must be a living reality in the present moment, similar to the biblical rule regarding manna in the wilderness.
The Technique of Forgiveness
Forgiving others does not require forcing oneself to like them, but rather establishing an impersonal goodwill and releasing them through a specific mental treatment.
People struggle with forgiveness because they mistakenly believe they must coerce themselves into liking the offender. The correct practice involves a quiet, deliberate act of mental release, handing the burden over to the Christ within, wishing the person well, and refusing to repeat the formal act afterward. You can execute this release through specific steps:
- Get by yourself and become quiet.
- Repeat any prayer or treatment that appeals to you, or read a chapter of the Bible.
- Quietly say: I fully and freely forgive X, I loose him and let him go.
- I completely forgive the whole business in question. As far as me concerned, it is finished forever.
- I cast the burden of resentment upon the Christ within me. He is free now, and I am free too.
- I wish him well in every phase of his life. That incident is finished. The Christ Truth has set us both free. I thank God.
- Get up and go about your business without repeating the formal act.
- Whenever the memory returns, bless the delinquent briefly and dismiss the thought.
The concluding doxology affirms the absolute omnipresence and allness of God as the doer, the doing, and the deed. The kingdom represents all creation on every plane, and the power belongs entirely to God, with humanity acting merely as the instruments through which Divine Intelligence operates. Recognizing that God works through you vastly increases the efficiency of prayers and transforms daily tasks. You should hold the thought that God is inspiring you when praying, and hold the thought that Divine Intelligence is working through you when performing ordinary tasks.
10 Key Ideas
- The Bible and the teachings of Jesus must be interpreted using a Spiritual Key rather than through literalism or human-made theological systems.
- The outer world has no independent character of its own and is entirely plastic to human thought taking place within your Secret Place.
- The Eight Beatitudes are not merely a set of moral ideals or impossible commandments, but a prose poem constituting a complete spiritual synopsis of Christian teaching centered on mental states.
- Entertaining feelings of anger, resentment, jealousy, or spite damages physical health according to natural law, regardless of whether you feel morally justified in having those feelings.
- It is much easier to overcome a difficulty immediately at its first appearance than after it has been allowed to dig itself into the mentality.
- Resisting undesirable circumstances mentally gives them power against you, whereas nonresistance causes them to crumble away.
- Scientific prayer requires concentrating definitively on specific current needs and treating the soul concerning any sense of lack.
- Since cause and effect must be similar, a perfect God cannot cause sickness, accidents, or death, because these are unlike His nature.
- People often mistake their job, business, or investments for the source of supply, whereas these are only channels.
- Forgiving others does not require forcing oneself to like them, but rather establishing an impersonal goodwill and releasing them through a specific mental treatment.