# Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1889)/05 Science of Being

CHAPTER V.
SCIENCE OF BEING.
So God created man in His image. In the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. — Genesis.
IN the material world, thought has brought to light with great rapidity many useful wonders. With like rapidity have thought's swift pinions been rising towards the realm of the real, to the spiritual cause of those lower things that give impulse to inquiry. The idea of a material basis, from which may be deduced all rationality, is yielding slowly to the idea of a metaphysical basis, looking away from matter to Mind as the cause of every effect. Materialistic philosophy challenges both physics and metaphysics to meet in final combat. In this revolutionary period, like the shepherd-boy with his sling, woman goes forth to battle with Goliath.
Plato, Spinoza, Kant discerned not the Science of Being. Their so-called metaphysical systems are pantheistic and pandemoniac. They are reeds shaken by the wind. From first to last the unity of good and evil was the philosophy of the serpent. Jesus' demonstrations separated the chaff from the wheat. This unfolded the reality and unity of Good, and the unreality of evil. Philosophy makes God man-like; Science makes man God-like; the first is error, the last is Truth.
​The theories I combat, stated fairly, are these: (1) that all is matter; (2) that matter originates in Mind, and is as real as Mind, possessing intelligence and life. The first-named theory, that matter is everything, is quite as reasonable as the second, that Mind and matter co-exist and co-operate. One only of the following statements can be true: (1) that everything is matter; (2) that everything is Mind. Which one is it?
The conservative position, that both matter and Mind have place and power, is untenable. Science is thorough, and permits no half-way positions. My original conclusion in 1866, that Mind is all in all, — that the only realities are the Divine Mind and its ideas, — this conclusion is not seen to be supported by sensible evidence, till the inquirer masters the principle and rule upon which the conclusion rests. This principle once learned, no other conclusion can be reached.
My discovery — that the erring mortal views, misnamed mind, produce all the organic and animal action of the mortal body — set thought to work in new channels; and I demonstrated this as the leading factor in Mind-science, — that Mind is all, and matter naught.
Few will deny that a higher Intelligence forms and governs the universe and man. It is self-evident that this Mind, or Divine Principle, can produce nothing unlike God the eternal Love. Sin, sickness, death, are comprised in a belief in matter. Because Spirit is real and harmonious, everything inharmonious — sin, sickness, death — is the opposite of Spirit, and must be the contradiction of reality, must be unreal. As Scripture states it, dust returns to dust, the unreal relapses into unreality.
​God is “all in all.” Hence nothing can be real that is unlike Him. Error in human premises leads to error in conclusions. That Spirit created matter is an erroneous premise. The mortality of matter confirms the conclusion that it never originated in the immortal; and is therefore not eternal Substance, Life, or Intelligence. Matter was therefore not created by Mind, or for Mind.
To all that is unlike Himself, the unerring and eternal Mind saith, “Thou shalt die.” Any copartnership of Mind with matter would annihilate Mind. Every system of human philosophy, doctrine, and medicine is more or less infested with the pantheistic notion of Mind in matter; but this pantheism contradicts alike revelation and right reason. The self-styled copartnership of Mind with matter is formed only to be eventually dissolved, in a manner and at a period unknown.
Matter disappears under the microscope of Spirit. A logical and scientific conclusion is reached only through the knowledge that there are not two bases of life, — matter and Mind, — but one, namely, Mind. Science never recognizes grapes as gathered from thorns or figs from thistles. Intelligence never produces non-intelligence, and matter is non-intelligent. The Immortal never produced the mortal, and good cannot result in evil. God is good and He is Spirit, and goodness and Spirit are immortal. Their opposites, evil and matter, must be therefore mortal, and are not the outcome of God.
The Science of Mind shows conclusively how it is that matter seemeth to be, but is not. Divine Science, rising above physical theories, excludes matter, resolves things into thoughts, and replaces the objects of material sense ​with spiritual ideas. All Science must be divine, since no science is of human origin. Ideas are tangible and real to immortal consciousness; and they have the advantage of being eternal.
Mind and thought comprise the whole of God, expressed in the spiritual universe and man. Reason and revelation coincide in the statement, and afford it proof, that nothing unspiritual can be harmonious or eternal. The realization that all discord is unreal brings into human view, from their true source, thoughts and things beautiful and immortal.
The eternal verity of things, rightly understood, results in the attainment of truth, or spirituality, — a striking contrast to the farce of materialization. One tends to purity. The other is the downward tendency and earthward gravitation towards sensualism, or error. The elevating, healing effects, and the spiritual tendency of Christian Science, are streams which betray a pure fountain.
Nothing hygienic can exceed the healing power of Mind. By Mind alone I have prevented disease, preserved and restored health, healed chronic as well as acute ailments in their severest forms, elongated shortened limbs, relaxed rigid muscles, restored decaying bones to healthy conditions, brought back the lost substance of the lungs and caused them to resume their proper functions.
Apart from the usual opposition to the new, the greatest obstacle in the way of introducing a Christian sanative system is the ability to express its metaphysics by physical terms, so as to be understood by the reader who has not personally demonstrated my rules. This ​difficulty is measurably overcome in practical teaching, where I can not only explicate spiritual meanings more fully, but the disciple can confirm his understanding by his own demonstration. Great care is needed to give the right interpretation, when translating physics back into the original spiritual text.
Christian Science explains all cause and effect as mental and not physical. It lifts the veil of mystery from Soul and body, shows the scientific relation of man to God, disentangles the interlaced ambiguities of being, and sets free the imprisoned thought — to know that in Science man and the universe, as well as their Divine Principle, are harmonious and eternal. Science reveals that what is termed matter is but a manifestation of mortal mind.
Science shows also that human views, conflicting mortal opinions and belief, at all times emit the odor of error, an atmosphere more destructive to morals and health than all other forms of miasma. Christian Science purifies this mental atmosphere, and thus invigorates and resuscitates the body.
Before the physical and moral effects of Christian Science are fully seen, Understanding and belief, Truth and error, Science and material sense, will meet in a war of ideas; and this war will continue until the thunderbolts of error die away in the distance, and the claims of Science are acknowledged.
Christendom resists my application of the word science to Christianity, or questions my use of it; but not on this account shall I lose faith in Christianity, nor will Christianity lose its hold on me.
The Principle of things must interpret both Science ​and Christianity. It is a grave mistake to attempt to steady the Ark of Science with an opinion. God is the Principle of all that represents Him, and of nothing else; for “there is none beside Him.”
The Christ-science, as taught by Jesus, reveals God's government as supreme. This Science declares a Divine Intelligence that is not a law of matter, since matter is not a law-giver. Science is an emanation of the eternal Mind, and is alone able to rightly interpret Truth. Hence its spiritual origin, and the nature of the Divine Comforter that leadeth into all Truth.
Christian Science eschews what is termed Natural Science, erected on the unnatural hypothesis that matter is its own law-giver, that law is governed by material conditions, and that these are final, overruling the might of Mind. Not less, but more, do these rejections prove Christian Science to rightly bear this name.
From Science I learn that Mind is Omnipotence, Omnipresence, Omniscience, all power, all presence, all Science; that there is but one cause, — hence but one Mind; that God creates and controls all.
In the Saxon language good was the term for God. The Scriptures declare all that He made to be good, like Himself: good in Principle and idea, — good as God, man, and the universe, which reflect the one Substance, Intelligence, and Soul. The visible and material are but poor counterfeits of the invisible and spiritual. God's thoughts are perfect and eternal. The imperfect and temporal are human thoughts, involving error, — causeless events and occurrences. Such transitory thoughts are the antipodes of Truth; though by the law of opposites these errors must also say, “We are true.”
​There is but one God. The spiritual He, She, and It are Mind and Mind's ideas. One God means One Mind; and this establishes the brotherhood of man, and fulfils the divine laws, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Erring, sinful, sick, and dying men are not the likenesses of the perfect and eternal Mind. But usage classifies both evil and good together as mind; therefore, to be understood, I will call sick and sinful humanity mortal mind, — meaning, by this term, the flesh that is opposed to Spirit, human error and evil in contradistinction to Goodness and Truth.
Matter is the primitive belief of mortal mind, that has no cognizance of Spirit. To mortal mind substance is matter, and evil is good; the senses of mortal mind are material, and its consciousness dependent on external sense.
This depraved mortality, misnamed mind, would become extinct, and mortals would be annihilated, were it not for man's indissoluble connection with God. This union Jesus brought to light in Divine Science; showing, through the law of opposites, that a mortal man is not the reality of man, hence this unreal man disappears to admit the reality.
The statement that “Truth is real” necessarily includes the corresponding statement, “Error is unreal.” The five physical senses are the avenues of mortal mind, and they indicate the common human belief — namely, that Life, Substance, and Intelligence are a blending of matter with Spirit. This is pantheism, and carries within its bosom the seeds of all error. Hence the Scripture: “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, ​and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other.”
Science reveals nothing in Spirit, out of which matter can be created. To Spirit there is no matter, even as to Truth no error, and to Good no evil. As we approach Spirit, we lose all consciousness of matter.
What then is the material personality which we call I? It is the embodiment of sin, sickness, and death. It is the unreal claim to true manhood or man as the image of his Maker, even as the angle of incidence is the reverse of the angles in the objects reflected. It is the false supposition that the opposite of Spirit is matter. But Spirit is God, and God is all, hence He hath no opposite. If man is both mind and matter, the loss of a limb would take away a portion of manhood, for matter and man would be one.
Are Mind, immortality, and consciousness resident in matter? Is God the source of matter, or does He dwell within the opposite of Himself? But He giveth not sin, pain, or death. Can matter recognize Mind? Can Deity be known by the bodily senses, — taste, touch, sight, smell, hearing? Can these senses, which afford no direct evidence of God, give correct testimony as to Life, Truth, or Love? Could God create such false representations of Himself as sin, sickness, and death? The answer must be in the negative.
They are error, and error is the opposite of Truth. If one is real, the other must be unreal. Spirit and its formations are the only realities of being. Neither partnership nor fellowship can exist between opposites. One can no more create the other than Truth can create error, or vice versa. As Mrs. Hemans says: —
* There are swift hours in life — strong, rushing hours,
* That do the work of tempests in their might!
* They shake down things that stood as rocks and towers
* Unto th' undoubting mind; they pour in light
* Where it but startles, like a burst of day,
* For which the uprooting of an oak makes way;
* They sweep the coloring mist from off our sight.
The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and real; the mutable and imperfect never touch the immutable and perfect; nor the inharmonious and self-destroying the harmonious and self-existing. These are tares and wheat that never mingle, but grow side by side until the harvest, when Science shall separate them, — through the apprehension of God as ever-present, and of man as made in His likeness.
Error is without the reality of Truth. The rule of reversion infers from error its opposite, Truth; and Truth is the link connecting man with his Maker. As mortals begin to understand Spirit they will give up the belief that there is aught substantial or intelligent — that there is any life — outside of God.
Nature and revelation inform us that like produces like. Matter is to be classified as error, because it falsely claims Life, Substance, and Intelligence — a claim ignored by Spirit.
Natural history presents minerals, vegetables, and animals as preserving their original species. A mineral is not produced by a vegetable, nor the human by the brute. In reproduction, throughout the entire round of nature, the order of genus and species is preserved. This indicates the spiritual Truth and Science of Being. Error relies upon a reversal of this order, asserts that ​Spirit produces matter and includes all the ills of flesh, and therefore that Good is the author of evil,—suppositions which contradict even natural science.
Divine Science—which, when applied to humanity, I denominate Christian Science—reveals God as not the author of sin, sickness, and death, and reveals Spirit as exempt from these evils. It teaches that matter is the falsity, not the fact, of existence; that nerves, brain, stomach, lungs, have—as matter—no intelligence, life, or sensation.
To say that Mind is in matter, or that matter is the medium of Mind, is no more rational than to say that a rock embraces an embryonic tree, and becomes the medium of the tree's development and individuality.
The only excuse for entertaining such opinions is our mortal ignorance of Spirit,—ignorance that yields only to the understanding of immortal existence, as revealed in that Science whereby we enter into the Kingdom of Truth on earth, and learn that Spirit is supreme, and that matter is a falsity claiming some other power or presence besides Him. Spirit and matter no more commingle than light and darkness. When one appears the other disappears.
Harmony in man is as real and immortal as in music. Discord is unreal and mortal. Superstition and Understanding can never combine. The latter destroys the former. Discord is the nothingness of error; harmony is the somethingness of Truth.
To say that Mind is beneath a skull-bone is a false description of intelligence. Sin and suffering belong not to a Divine Mind. Without rightful origin or existence, they have neither Principle nor permanence, but ​belong to the native nothingness of error, — simulating the creation of Mind through dust that returns to dust, instead of through Spirit that is eternal. Error supposes man to he both mental and material. Divine Science contradicts this postulate, and rebukes material sense.
To the question, “What is the Ego; whence its origin, what its destiny?” Christian Science replies: I is Spirit or Soul, not physical sense. There is but one I, one Mind or Spirit, because there is but one God. Man reflects this one Mind, and the personal I surrenders to the Father, from whom man's individuality is reflected spiritually. Man, in the likeness of God, is not matter.
Spirit is God, Soul; and Soul, or Spirit, is not in man; else God would have but one representative, namely, man, and man would be identical with God. Man is the spiritual idea of God; and God is not in His reflection, any more than a man is in the mirror which returns his likeness.
Man should have no other Mind than God. In reality he has not. It is only a delusion that he seems to have another mind; and this delusion is the inverted image of Mind, in everything turned upside-down, fancying that Soul is in body, Spirit in matter, Immortality in mortality, the Infinite in the finite, and Principle in fragmentary ideas.
To grasp the reality and order of being, we must begin by reckoning God as the only Life, Substance, and Intelligence. We must leave sin, sickness, and death out of the account, regarding them as not the reality of being, but as its counterfeit, and recognizing the genuine selfhood only in what is good and true; for man is not the offspring of flesh, but of Spirit.
​The absence of Truth we name Error. But did God create error? How could He create the absence or opposite of Himself? He is ever-present and He is the all. The same fountain sends not forth sweet and bitter waters. Being omnipresent, God can never be absent.
Error is human illusion, without personal identity or principle, and has no existence save to mistaken human belief. It is a mistake to suppose that Life, Substance, and Intelligence are in matter, or of it; for matter is neither thing, nor person, but merely human belief. The five physical senses imagine Truth and error as mingling in a mind both good and evil. This false evidence must yield to the appreciation of Spirit and His creation.
Erroneous belief is mortal self-mesmerism. Change the belief, and that disappears which before seemed real to it; and whatever is accepted in place of the forsaken belief now seems real. The only fact concerning any belief is, that it is neither true nor eternal, but subject to change and death. Faith is higher than belief. It is a chrysalis state of thought, wherein spiritual evidence, unseen to the material senses, begins to appear; and Truth, that is ever present, is becoming understood.
Belief has its degrees of comparison. Some beliefs are better than others, but none are founded on the rock. They can be shaken; and until belief becomes faith, and faith becomes understanding, belief has no relation to the actual.
The Divine Principle that Jesus taught and demonstrated — Life, Truth, and Love — was designed for human acceptance and confirmation, so that those who arrive not at the understanding and proof of almighty ​power are without excuse. Sin, sickness, death, — whatever indicates the opposite of God, or His absence, — is a belief only, and this belief is neither the mind nor body of man, for it is not begotten of the Father. That sin is unsustained by Truth, and brought sickness and death in its train, is proof that these are all forms of error.
The fact that the Christ, or Truth, overcame and still overcomes death, proves the King of Terrors to be but a mortal belief, or error, which Truth destroys with the spiritual evidences of Life; and this shows that what appears to the senses as death, is but a mortal illusion, instead of man or the universe in the death-process.
Matter has no life to lose, and Spirit never dies. The belief disappears, that Life and Intelligence are in or of matter, as the immortal facts of being are seen, whose only Life, or Intelligence, is God, or good. Spirit is reached only through the understanding and demonstration of Life, Truth, and Love.
Neither understanding nor Truth accompanies error, nor is error the offshoot of Intelligence. Evil calls itself something when it is nothing. It saith, “I am man, but I am not the image and likeness of God.”
Jesus, explaining the origin of material and mortal manhood, said: “Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father, the devil [error], and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the Truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar, and the father of it.”
The more material a belief, the more tenacious its error; the stronger the manifestations of material sense, ​the weaker the indications of Soul. What is erringly termed mind sees only what it believes, and believes only what it sees — what the material senses declare. This mortal belief, misnamed man, says: “Matter has intelligence and sensation; nerves feel; brains think and sin; the stomach can make a man cross; limbs can cripple and matter kill him.” This verdict of the so-called five material senses victimizes mortals, taught as they are by physiology, and in Materia medica, to revere those five personal lies that our Master so sharply referred to, — lies which are destroyed by Truth, through spiritual sense and understanding. Rightly understood, instead of possessing sentient matter we have sensationless bodies; and God, the Soul of man or existence, is perpetual in His individuality, harmony, and immortality. In the words of F. W. H. Myers: —
* Oh could I tell, ye surely would believe it!
* Oh could I only say what I have seen!
* How should I tell, or how can ye receive it,
* How, till He bringeth you where I have been?
The admission that there is substance-matter requires another admission, equally false — that there is no substance-Spirit, and matter is self-creative, self-existent, and eternal; whence it would follow that there are two eternal causes, warring forever with each other; yet it cannot be so, since the One Spirit is supreme. How can the mortal body be man's being, when man is immortal?
The notion of the eternity of matter contradicts the demonstration of Life as Spirit; and this contradiction would lead to the inference that if man is matter, he originated in dust and must return to it — logic which would prove his annihilation. But Soul is never in a ​finite form. The limited never for a moment contains the unlimited and immortal.
The lines of demarcation between immortal man, representing Spirit, and mortal man, representing the error that Life and Intelligence are in matter, show the pleasures and pains of matter to be myths, and human belief to be the father of mythology, wherein matter is deemed the intelligent god of error.
Reversed by Divine Science, the evidence before the personal senses disappears. Hence the opposition of sensuous man to the Science of Soul, and the significance of the Scripture, “The carnal mind is at enmity with God.”
Mortal body and material man are delusions that spiritual understanding destroys; but the real man loses not his identity because of this destruction, for he has the conscious infinitude of being. That man should lose aught, when he has all, is impossible. The notion that Mind is in matter, and in the so-called pleasures and pains, the sin, sickness, and death of matter, — this notion is all that will ever be lost.
It is a self-evident error that there can be such a reality as animal or vegetable life, when all that remains of it is death; because Life is never for a moment extinct, is never structural or organic, and never is absorbed or limited by its own formations. Life is the Creator reflected in His creations. If He dwelt within what He creates, God would not be reflected but absorbed, and the Science of Being would be forever lost, — through a mortal idea of life that has beginning and end, instead of that immortality which is “without beginning of years or end of days.”
​The chief corner-stone of Science is the following postulate, that the immortal basis of Life is Soul, not body, — Life, not death; and this Science reveals the glorious possibilities of man, unlimited by mortal short-sightedness. Life is not learned from death. Spiritual being has no consciousness of death or life in matter, and in Truth we lose what we have learned from error. “The last shall be first, and the first last.” What we now esteem as matter will dissolve into its native elements of oblivion.
Divine Science puts not new wine into old bottles, Soul into matter, nor the Infinite into the finite. Our false views of matter must perish before we can grasp the facts of Spirit. The old belief must disappear, or the new idea will be spilled, and the inspiration that changes our standpoints will be gone. Now, as of old, Truth casts out error and heals the sick.
Continuing our definition of Man, let us remember that beyond and above the mortal illusion of Life, Substance, and Intelligence existent in matter, there has existed forever the harmonious and immortal man; and this is fact, not fable. The Science of Being reveals man as perfect, even as the Father is perfect; because the Soul of man is God, and the real man is governed by Soul, instead of sense, by the law of Spirit, instead of the supposed law of Intelligence in matter.
God is Love. He is therefore Divine Principle, not person. Man is His image and likeness, and consciousness is in Soul, not body. The minutiæ and infinity of individualities reflect God's individuality, and are comprehended and formed by Soul, not by material sense, by Spirit, not by matter. In the divine sequence the ​senses of man are ever spiritual, attached to Soul instead of matter, and thought passes from Soul to govern man, but never returns a sensation or report from matter to Soul, for matter is not, and cannot be, cognizant of evil or good.
The Science of Being shows it is impossible for infinite Soul to be in a finite body, and man to be a separate intelligence from his Maker. When this is understood it will unfold the universal brotherhood of man, wherein one mind is not at war with another, but all have one Mind, one Soul. Man and his Maker are correlated in divine Science, and consciousness is cognizant only of the things of God.
Science, reversing the seeming relation of Soul and body, — as astronomy reverses the human perception of the movement of the solar system, — makes body tributary to Mind. Even as it is the earth that is in motion while the sun is at rest, though in viewing the sunrise from Mount Washington one finds it impossible to believe the sun is not really rising, so body is but the humble servant of the restful Mind, though it seems otherwise to finite sense. But we shall never understand this while we admit that Soul is in body, Mind in matter, and that man is included in non-intelligence. Soul is God who was and ever will be eternal, and man co-exists with and reflects Soul, and is eternal.
Unless the harmony and immortality of man are becoming more apparent, we are not gaining the true idea of God; and the body will manifest what governs it, whether it be Truth or error, Understanding or belief, Spirit or matter. Therefore “acquaint thyself now with God, and be at peace.”
​The various beliefs of mortals, culminating in religious dogmas and medical theories, are mainly predicated of matter; and that affords no gleam of God, Truth. Spiritual ideas, like numbers and notes, start from Principle instead of person, and admit no illusions concerning them. They lead up to their divine origin, which, once understood, brings harmony.
The false bearings of knowledge lead to sin and death. When Spirit and matter, Truth and error, seem to commingle, they rest only upon foundations that time is wearing away. Finite knowledge does no justice to Truth in any direction. It limits all things, and would compress Infinite Mind within a skull. It can neither apprehend nor worship the Infinite. To accommodate a human finite sense of Soul, it seeks to divide the One Soul into many. This error has “lords many and gods many.”
Jesus said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” and Jehovah's first command is, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me;” but behold the zeal of belief to establish the opposite error of “gods many.” The Serpent's argument in the Eden allegory, " “I will make you as gods,” runs through every avenue of mortal belief, asserting Soul to be in body, and Infinite Life to be in finite forms.
Human philosophy seeks Cause in effect, Principle in its idea, and Life and Intelligence in matter. Medicine would learn the state of a man from matter, instead of from Mind. It examines the lungs, tongue, and pulse, to ascertain how much harmony, or health, matter is permitting to Mind, how much pain or pleasure, action or stagnation, matter is allowing matter.
​Physiology, exalting matter and dethroning Mind, would rule man by material law instead of spiritual; and, failing to give health or life by this process, ignores the Divine Spirit as unable or unwilling to render help in time of physical need. If mortals sin, they are dealt with according to a theology that admits God to be the healer of sin but not of sickness, although our blessed Master demonstrated that he could save from sickness as well as sin.
If the Infinite were within the finite, God would be human, and unlimited Mind spring from a limited body; whereas limitless Mind can have no starting-point and return to no limit, but must forever radiate through unfathomable space. Mind is not person. Pre-existing, it must antedate all material formation. Having no starting-point, Mind can never be in bonds, or be fully manifested through personality. God is individual, not personal; to be omnipresent, God must fill universal space. To conceive of such personality is impossible.
The artist is not in his painting; the picture is his thought evolved. The human belief fancies that it delineates thought on matter; but what is matter? Was it before thought? Matter is made up of forces, and force is reduced to Mind; and thought will finally be understood and seen without material accompaniments. The potter is not in the clay; else the clay would have power over the potter. God reproduces His own individuality, and He cannot really be in His reflection.
Knowledge is a mortal, finite sense of things that Spirit disclaims. Human knowledge mistakes cause for effect, limits Life, holds fast to discord and death. Man and the universe, interpreted by their Divine Principle, ​can be understood; but, defined by what is termed personal sense, they are ambiguous, and subject to growth, maturity, and decay. Impressions gained through matter are the beliefs of mortal mind, — the offspring of sense not Soul, — symbolizing all that is evil and destructible. The senses of Spirit are understanding, unerring and demonstrable ideas. Hence their necessity to Christianity, and to the establishment of Truth.
Human knowledge is a blind guide, a Samson shorn of his locks. Without organization, its only life, it lacks moral strength. Idea and Principle are born of Spirit, and are not mere inferences from a material premise.
Adhesion, cohesion, and attraction are not forces of matter. They are properties of Mind; they belong to Principle. They launched the earth in its orbit. They are from Him who saith to the proud wave, “Thus far and no farther.” We tread on forces. Withdraw them, and the universe would collapse. Human knowledge calls these mental forces Matter; but Divine Science gives them back to Mind.
God creates and governs the universe and man, — as spiritual ideas that He evolves, and which are obedient to the Mind that made them. Mortal mind translates the spiritual into the material, and must give back the original rendering, if it would escape from the mortality of such error. Longfellow well sings: —
* Our little lives are kept in equipoise
* By opposite attractions and desires, —
* The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
* And the more noble instinct that aspires.
Mind is the source of all movement. There is no inertia in Mind's perpetual and harmonious action. ​Mortal mind, prolific of error, sickness, sin, and death, acts and reacts, and then comes to a stop; but this error is not the actual Mind, which is the same Life, Truth, and Love, “yesterday, to-day, and forever.” Ideas rest on understanding, not on belief.
Personal sense defines disease as a reality; but the Scriptures declare that Spirit makes all, even while this personal sense is saying that matter makes disease, and Immortal Mind cannot heal it. Human sense supports all that is untrue, selfish, or debased. It would put Soul into soil, Life into limbo, and doom all things to decay. We must put to silence this lie of material sense, with the Truth of spiritual sense. We must cause the error to cease that brought sin and death, and would shut out the pure sense of omnipotence.
Is the sick man a sinner above all others? No, but he is not the idea of God, in that he is sick. Weary of their material beliefs, whence so much sorrow comes, mortals grow more spiritual, as the error (or belief that Life is in matter) yields to the hope of spiritual existence. A wicked man is not the idea of God; he is little else than error's representative. To suppose that hatred, envy, pride, malice, hypocrisy, have Life abiding in them, is a terrible mistake. Life and its idea, Truth and its idea, never made a man sick or sinful. Mortals are not like immortals, created in God's own image; yet there is enough of good, of Infinite Spirit, acknowledged by this mortal consciousness, to at last reveal the sense of being that is real and perfect, forever intact.
We all look on a corpse, not as man, but simply as matter. Men say, “The body is dead;” but this death was the departure of a mortal illusion, not of matter ​The matter is there still. The consent of that mortal belief to die occasioned its death and departure; yet you say it was matter that died.
You say that Soul is lost, and yet is immortal. If Soul sinned it would die; for spiritual death is oblivion. Only because it is Spirit, that hath no element of self-destruction, Soul is immortal. Is man lost spiritually ? No, he can only be lost materially. All sin is material; it cannot be spiritual. Sin exists only so long as the illusion of matter remains. It is the sense of sin, and not the sinful soul, that is to be lost.
Entity signifies the particular nature of being; God, without the image and likeness of Himself in man, would be a nonentity. Spiritual man is the idea of God, an idea that cannot be lost or separated from its Divine Principle. When the evidence before the material senses yielded to the spiritual sense of Soul, Paul declared that nothing could separate him from the love of God, — the sweet sense and presence of Life and Truth.
Truth, demonstrated, is eternal Life. Mortal man can never rise from the temporal débris of error, — the belief in sin, sickness, and death, — until he learns that God is his only Life. While the belief continues of life and sensation in the body, the body will be mortal; and mortals will be governed in belief by their bodies.
Harmony is controlled by its Principle, is produced by it and abides with it. Principle is the Life of man; hence his happiness is not at the disposal of personal sense. Truth is not contaminated by error.
Whence came to me this conviction, in antagonism to the testimony of the human senses? From the ​self-evident fact that matter has no sensation; from the common human experience of the falsity of all material things; from the obvious fact that mortal mind is what suffers, feels, sees; since matter cannot suffer.
My conclusions are reached by allowing this evidence to multiply with mathematical certainty, and the lesser demonstration to prove the greater; as three multiplied by three, equalling nine, proves conclusively that three times three duodecillions will be, must be, nine duodecillions.
The irrational belief that pain is located in a limb which has been removed, when really the sensation is believed to be in the nerves, is an added proof of the the unreliability of physical testimony.
The inebriate believes there is pleasure in intoxication. The thief believes he has gained something by stealing, and the hypocrite that he is hiding himself; but the Science of Mind corrects such mistakes, as the demonstration of Truth destroys error.
Electricity is not a vital fluid, but an element of mortal mind, — the thought-essence that forms the link between what is termed matter and mortal mind. Both are different strata of human belief. The grosser substratum is named matter. The more ethereal is called human mind, which is the nearer counterfeit of the immortal Mind, and hence the more accountable and sinful belief. Both are false presentations of facts, for the Immortal and mortal never touch.
The manifestation of God through mortals is as light passing through the window-pane. The light and glass never mingle. That mortal mind through which Truth appears most vividly, must have lost much materiality and error to become a better transparency for Truth. ​Then, like a cloud melting into thin vapor, it no longer hides the light.
The electricity of mortal mind, its gases and forces, are counterfeits of the spiritual forces of Eternal Mind, whose omnipotence is Truth, whose attraction is Love, whose adhesion and cohesion are Life, perpetuating the eternal identities. Electricity is the essence of mortal mind, the counterfeit of the true essence of Eternal Mind, — the great difference being that one is divine.
The self-destructive forces of mortal thought are expressed in the earthquake, the wind, wave, lightning, fire, the ferocity of beasts. These counterfeit divine justice and are called in the Scriptures “the anger of the Lord.” Really they signify His mercy in justice, the strength and permanency of Truth, whose supremacy is ever asserting itself. Christian Science brings to light Truth and its supremacy, universal harmony, the entireness of God, and the nothingness of matter.
Human opinions and beliefs, the testimony of material sense, cause the suppositional warfare between Truth and error, between the evidences of the spiritual senses and of the so-called material senses; and this warfare will continue until every question between them is determined by the immutable Principle of right.
There is no material Truth, and what are termed the personal senses can take no cognizance of spiritual Truth. Divine Science, reversing the testimony of the material senses, tears away the foundations of error. Hence the enmity between them, and the impossibility of perfect understanding till error disappears.
Deductions from material hypotheses are not scientific. They differ from actual Science in not being based on ​Mind. The Science of Mind deals with disease as error, and heals with Truth. Medical science treats disease as if it were real, and heals it, or attempts to heal it, with matter. Material methods are temporary, and have never elevated mankind.
Materia medica, like its narcotics, satisfies mortal mind, and so reaches the body, but leaves both mind and body the worse for this abnormal submission. Christian Science impresses both the human mind and body, and brings out the immortal proof that Life is continuous and harmonious. As with a two-edged sword, Science both amputates error and destroys it. Mankind is the better for this profound surgery.
Life is no more in the forms that express it, than substance is in its shadow. If Life were in mortal man, or material things, it would be subject to their limitations and end in death. A belief fulfils the illusive conditions of belief. Sickness, sin, and death seem as real to human belief as do Life, Truth, and Love. As a cloud hides the sun it cannot extinguish, so belief may seem to silence the voice of immutable harmony, but cannot destroy its Science.
If Soul is immortal it cannot be finite. By losing the finite sense of being we gain the eternal unfolding of Life, and this is immortality. Day may decline and shadows fall, but darkness flees when the earth has again turned upon its axis. The sun is not affected by the revolution of the earth. So Science reveals Soul as untouched by sin and death, as the central Life and Intelligence around which circle harmoniously all things in the systems of Mind, — spirituality and individuality. All Science is divine. Human thought never ​projected the least portion of Science. It has caught and interpreted in its own way the echo of Spirit, and repeated it materially, but it has never produced a tone, or sent forth a positive sound.
As long as we believe that Soul can sin, or that Soul is in the body, we can never understand the Science of Being. When humanity does understand this Science it will be the law of Life to man, — even the higher law of Soul, that prevails over sense, through harmony and immortality. The so-called laws of matter have never made mortals whole, harmonious, or immortal. Hence the importance of understanding that Science of Being which reveals perfection. Human belief has sought out many inventions, but not one of them can solve a problem without the Principle of Science. The body cannot be harmonious if not governed by Soul.
The governor is not subject to the governed. In Science the body is governed by its Principle, as numbers are ruled by their law. The Intelligence does not originate in the numbers, but is made manifest through them. The body does not include Soul, but simply manifests it. The delusion that there is life in matter has no kinship with the Life supernal.
It is morally wrong to examine the body in order to ascertain if we are in health, and what are our life-prospects; because this is to take the government of man out of the hands of God. To employ drugs for the cure of disease shows a lack of faith in God, the Divine Principle of all harmony; and physical harmony is health. The ancient Christian healers tell us that “He is a very present help in time of trouble.” Mystery and miracle and error will disappear when ​it becomes fairly understood that Spirit controls the body, and that man should have no other mind but God.
The belief that Life is in matter may be changed, by the universal law of mortal mind, to a belief in death. Then mortal man, like the tree or flower, is supposed to die; but the fact remains that man and the universe are immortal and spiritual.
The spiritual fact and the material belief of things are opposites, but the spiritual is true; and therefore the material, which is its opposite, must be untrue. Life is not in matter, so that it cannot be said to pass out of it. Hence there is no death, for Spirit and all things spiritual are eternal.
The principle of music governs tones; but if mortals caught harmony through the ear, — a material sense, — they would lose it again if time or accident robbed them of hearing. To be master of chords and discords, musical science must be understood. Left to the decisions of material sense, music is liable to be misapprehended and run into discord. Controlled by a belief, instead of by the understanding, it must be imperfectly expressed. Even thus man, not understanding Science, — his Divine Principle, or Soul, thrust aside as incomprehensible, — is abandoned to conjectures, left in the hands of ignorance, placed at the disposal of illusions, subjected to the same material sense which creates the discord. A discontented, discordant mortal is no more a man than discord is music.
It is ignorance and belief alone, based on a material sense of things, that hide spiritual beauty and good. Understanding this, Paul said, “Neither height nor ​depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.” This is Divine Science: that Love cannot be deprived of its manifestation, or object; that joy cannot be turned into sorrow; that good can never produce evil, nor Life result in death. Hence the perfect man, governed by the perfect Principle we name God, has immortality, sinlessness, and everlasting existence.
Anatomy has never defined man as created by Spirit, — as God's man. It explains the man of men, created materially instead of spiritually, and as emerging from the lowest instead of from the highest conception of being. Anatomy defines man as matter and mind, and Mind as being at the mercy of matter for every function, formation, and manifestation. It takes man up at all points materially. It loses Spirit, drops the true tone and accepts the discord. It lays aside the Principle that produced harmonious man, and deals only with matter, calling that man which is not the counterpart, but the counterfeit, of God's man.
Can we gather peaches from a hedge, or deduce from discord the concord of being? Yet such are some of the leading illusions that serve as milestones to point out the path which Science must tread in its mission among mortals.
It is self-evident error — the belief that pain and pleasure, life and death, holiness and unholiness, mingle in man; yet that man is at the same time in the likeness of Life, Truth, and Love, is spiritually conceived and created. All the vanity of the ages can never make that contradiction true. Science lays the axe at the root of the illusion that Life, or Mind, is in the material body, ​and will eventually hew down this illusion, either through a belief of death, or a better understanding of the Science of Life.
If God be admitted as the only Mind and Life, there is left no room for sin and death. When we learn in Science how to be perfect, even as our Father in Heaven is perfect, thought is turned into new and healthy channels, — towards the contemplation of things immortal, and away from the personality to the Principle of man. Because Life is God, it must be eternal, self-existent, — the everlasting “I Am,” the Being that was, and is, and shall be, and that nothing can erase.
Truth is “the resurrection and the Life,” for it destroys the belief that Mind, the only immortality of man, can be buried in the body, and Life be subject to death.
Knowledge gained from material sense is figuratively represented in Scripture as a tree, bearing the fruits of sin, sickness, and death. Ought we not then to judge this knowledge, thus conveyed, as untrue and dangerous, since “the tree is known by its fruits?”
Human resistance to Divine Science weakens in proportion as mortals give up error for Truth, and the understanding of being supersedes mere belief. Until I learned the vastness of Christian Science, the fixedness of mortal illusions, and human hatred of Truth, I had cherished sanguine hopes that Christian Science would meet with immediate and general acceptance. When the scientific relation of man to God is perceived we shall begin to demonstrate scientific being, by destroying the errors of sense and healing the sick.
Then we shall change our standpoints of Life and Intelligence from a material to a spiritual basis, gain the ​perfect Life, or control of Soul over sense, and receive Christianity, or Truth, in its Divine Principle. This must be the climax, before harmonious and immortal man is fully understood and demonstrated. It is highly important — in view of the immense work to be accomplished before this recognition of Divine Science — to turn our thoughts in this direction, that finite belief may be prepared to relinquish its error.
If the Principle, rule, and demonstration of being are not in the least understood before what is termed death reaches us, we shall rise no higher in the scale of being at that single point of experience; but we shall remain as material as before the transition, still seeking happiness through a material instead of through a spiritual sense of Life, and through selfish and personal motives. So long as it lasts, error will incur the penalty of sickness, sin, and death; and these will continue so long as the belief remains that Life and Mind are finite in the body, and manifested through brains or nerves.
If the change called death destroyed the belief that pleasure and pain commingle and proceed from the body, happiness would be won at the moment of dissolution, and be forever permanent; but this is not so. Perfection is gained only by degrees, so that they who are “unrighteous shall be unrighteous still,” until Science remove all their ignorance and sin.
Each sin and error, possessing us at the instant of death, ceases not with the dissolution of matter, but endures till the death of the error. To be wholly spiritual man must be sinless. He becomes spiritual only as he reaches perfection. The murderer, though slain in the act, does not thereby forsake sin. He is no more spiritual ​for believing his body dead, and learning that his cruel mind is not dead. His thoughts are no purer until he disarms evil with good. His body is as material as his mind, and vice versa.
Progress is born of experience. It is the ripening of mortal man, that drops the mortal for the immortal. Either here or hereafter suffering or Science must purge this false illusion about Life and Intelligence, and cleanse man of sense and self. The old man, with his deeds, must be put off. Nothing sensual or sinful is immortal. The death of sin is all that can awaken man to the Life that is real and eternal.
The so-called pleasures and pains of personal sense perish in the rough anguish; and these must be destroyed before the actuality of being is attained. Mortal belief must lose all satisfaction in sin, in order to part with it.
Whether mortals will learn this here or hereafter, and now long they will suffer the pangs of fiery purification, must depend upon the tenacity of error. Feeling so perpetually the false consciousness that life is bodily, yet remembering that God is really our Life, we may tremble for the days in which we must say “I have no pleasure in them.”
The suppositions that sin is pardoned while unforsaken, that happiness can be universal in the midst of sin, that the so-called death of the body frees from sin, and that God's pardon is not the destruction of sin — these are grave mistakes. We know that all will be changed in the twinkling of an eye “when the last trump shall sound;” but the last call of Wisdom cannot come till mortals have yielded to each lesser call in the growth of ​Christian character. Mortals need not fancy that belief in death will awaken them to glorified being.
“As the tree falleth, so shall it lie.” As man falleth asleep, so shall he awaken. As death findeth mortal man, so shall he be after death, until probation affects the needful change. Mind is never dust. No resurrection from the grave awaits Mind, for the grave has no power over it. No final judgment awaits mortals, for the judgment-day of Wisdom is passed hourly and continually, — the judgment by which mortal man is being divested of all material error; and spiritual error, there is none.
When the last mortal fault is destroyed, then the final trump will sound that ends the battle of Truth with sin and mortality; but of “that day and hour, no man knoweth.” Here prophecy pauses. Science alone can probe the thoughts and depths of being, and point to eternal Life. Universal salvation rests on progression, and is unattainable without it. Heaven is not a locality, but a state, in which Mind and body are harmonious and immortal, because sin is destroyed, and man is found having no righteousness of his own, and no Mind but God.
The mirage — which makes trees and cities seem to be where they are not — illustrates the illusion of that man who is not in the image of God. So far as this statement is understood it will be admitted, and the true reflection of God — the real man, or the new man (as Paul has it) — will appear.
The time has come for this finite notion, of the body as God, to give place to a diviner sense of Mind and its manifestation, in the better understanding that Science ​gives of the Supreme Being, or Divine Principle, named, in the Scriptures, Life, Truth, Love. Interpreting God as a personal Saviour, instead of the saving Principle, we shall continue to seek salvation through pardon and not through reform, and resort to matter instead of Spirit to heal the sick.
As Divine Science compels this advancement, mortals will seek to learn, not from a person, but from the Divine Principle, how to understand and demonstrate Christ as healing and saving. To seek Truth through belief, is seeking the immutable and immortal through the mutable and mortal; and to depend upon belief instead of demonstration is fatal to Science.
It is essential to understand, instead of believe, what relates most to the happiness of being. The comprehension of Truth gives the proper faith in it, and is better than all burnt-offerings. The Master said, “No man cometh unto the Father [the Principle of Being] but by me.” Christ, the Truth and Life of man, must be Principle, not person, for Christ saith, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
The only real substance and intelligence are Life, Truth, Love. One in essence, in office infinite, they are the three in one which constitute all. Personal causation, or effect, was put aside from first to last in the life of this original man, Jesus. Divine Principle must create and govern all that is real.
Jesus was the son of a virgin. The term Christ Jesus, or Jesus the Christ (to give the full and proper translation of the Greek), may be rendered “Jesus the anointed,” — Jesus the Messiah, the crowned, or the royal man; as it is said of him in the first chapter of Hebrews: —
* Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee
* With the oil of gladness above thy fellows.
To this agrees another passage in the same chapter, which refers to the Son as “the brightness of His [God's] glory, and the express [or expressed] image of His person [or individuality].” It is noteworthy that the words express image, in the Common Version, are, in the Greek Testament, character. Using this word in its higher meaning, we may assume that the author of this remarkable epistle thought of Jesus the Christ as the royal reflection of the Infinite; and the motive given for this exaltation is, that the Christ “loved righteousness and hated iniquity.” The spiritual sense of the passage is made even clearer in the scholarly translation of the late Professor George R. Noyes: “Who being a brightness from His glory, and an image of His being.”
Jesus' spiritual origin, and his demonstration of the Divine Principle, richly endowed him, and entitled him to Sonship in Science. God the Father, Jesus the Son, Divine Science the Holy Ghost, — these three titles express the threefold essential nature of the Infinite, as the everlasting scientific being, and they indicate the relation between God and man.
Christian Science draws its support from the Bible, from the holy influence of Truth in healing sickness and sin. This healing power of Truth must have reached behind the period in which Jesus lived. It is as ancient as the Ancient of Days. It lives through all Life, extends through all extent. It spreads, but is undivided. It operates, but is unspent. Jesus' system of healing received no aid or approval from other sanitary or ​religious systems, from doctrines of physics or divinity, and it has not yet been generally accepted.
The prophets of old believed, but did not understand. They looked for something higher than the systems of their times; hence their foresight of Christ's coming. But even they knew not what would be the precise nature of the teaching and demonstration of God, in the more infinite meanings, that should reinstate harmony, destroy sin, sickness, and death, establish the definition of omnipotence, and give the true Science of Spirit.
Jesus established in the Christian era the precedent for all Christianity, theology, and healing. Christians now, as then, are under as direct orders to be Christlike, to possess his Spirit and follow his example, — healing the sick as well as the sinner; and they will find it much easier to cast out the evil of sickness than the evil of sin. The sick are more willing to part with the pains of sense than the sinner with the pleasures of sense, and the Christian can prove this to-day as readily as he could eighteen centuries ago. Let the gainsayer disprove this if he can.
The system Jesus taught rested upon this platform: “Go ye into all the world. Heal the sick and preach the gospel to the poor. Love thy neighbor as thyself.” It was his theology that healed the sick and sinner; and it is his theology, in this book, that heals the sick, and causes the evil to forsake their ways and the righteous to rejoice. It is his theology that the rulers sought of old to kill, and are to-day antagonizing.
This was the Divine Science of which our Master said “When he shall come, he will show you all things.” The Sermon on the Mount is the essence of this Science. ​His life, and not his death, was its outcome. Those who are willing at this hour to leave their nets, or to cast them on the right side for Truth, have the opportunity to learn and practise Christian healing. The Scriptures contain it all. The spiritual import of the Word imparts the power. But, as Paul says, “How shall they hear without a preacher, and how shall they preach except they be sent?” And if sent, how shall they preach, convert, and heal multitudes, except the rabbis are willing?
Jesus' parable of the Sower shows the care of our Master not to impart to dull ears and gross hearts spiritual teachings they could not accept. Reading their thoughts he said, “Give not that which is holy unto dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.” The spiritual sense of Truth is indigenous to the soil of a “good and honest heart.” Spiritual seed can be sown in no other soil and bear much fruit, because the swine in human hearts rend it. Jesus said, “Ye do greatly err, not understanding the Scriptures.” The spiritual sense of the Scripture is the new tongue, referred to in the last chapter of Mark's Gospel.
Life and its opposite (the so-called life in matter) are figured by two geometrical symbols, a circle and straight line. The circle represents the infinite, without beginning or end. The straight line represents the finite, which has both beginning and ending. The sphere represents self-existent and eternal Mind; the straight line, a belief in self-existent and temporal matter. The blind forces called attraction, adhesion, and cohesion are not substances of matter. Spirit is the Life-substance and continuity of all. Truth is the intelligence of Mind; ​error is the so-called intelligence of matter. These opposite symbols never unite in figure or Soul. The straight line finds no abiding-place in a curve, and the curve no adjustment to the straight line.
Matter has no place in Spirit, and Spirit has no place in matter. Truth has no home in error, and error no foothold in Truth. Intelligence cannot pass into non-intelligence and matter, nor can non-intelligence become Spirit. At no point can these opposites mingle or unite. Truly says a humorous poet: —
* There is no force, however great,
* Can stretch a cord, however fine,
* Into a horizontal line,
* That shall be accurately straight.
Even though they seem to touch, one is still a curve, and the other remains a straight line.
But what say our theorists? They insist that Life, or God, is one and the same with the so-called life of matter. They speak of both error and Truth as Mind, and of Spirit as both good and evil. They claim as Life organic such life as the senses perceive, the structural life of the tree and material man. Vegetable and animal life they deem the manifestation of the One Life, — that is, God.
This incorrect belief regarding Life detracts from the character or nature of Deity so essentially, that we lose the true sense of God's power in our false estimates of what really manifests Him. Misstating the Divine Principle, or Life, we can no longer practically demonstrate it in length of days, like the patriarchs; nor can we rest in the harmony of Divine Science, any more ​than we can teach and illustrate geometry by calling a curve a straight line, or a straight line a sphere.
What is termed Matter cannot be substance, if Spirit is substance. A New Testament writer plainly describes a quality of Mind, faith, as “the substance of things hoped for.” Which ought to be substance — the erring, changing, and dying, the mutable and mortal, or the unerring, immutable, and immortal? Naming matter, or what is so called, a lawgiver, simply indicates a delusion that material law exists. This is a self-evident mistake. God never made a law material to annul the law spiritual; and if there were such a law, it would prevent the supremacy of Mind. Jesus trod the waves and healed the sick, in direct contradiction of what are termed material laws.
We are commonly taught that Soul sins, and is lost spiritually. Then the annihilation of Soul is inevitable; for its only Life is Spirit, and if it loses this Life it hath no other, and is annihilated. If Soul sinned it would die. Sin has the elements of self-destruction, and the Scripture saith, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.”
What is termed personal mind, or spirit, — erring, sinning, and dependent on matter for manifestation and life, — is not Mind. God is not in the things He hath made. All that He hath made is good; hence there is no evil therein.
Soul, or Mind, is not seen by a personal sense, because it is Spirit, which personal sight cannot discern. If Soul: could sin it would be material instead of spiritual. It is the thought and motive of material sense that sin. There is neither growth, maturity, nor decay in Soul. ​These are the mutations of sense, the varying clouds of mortal belief, that hide the Truth of Being.
The objects of sense have not the reality of Substance. They are what mortal belief names them, and are only what they appear to this belief. As we escape from a false sense of Life, Substance, and Intelligence, and pass from the standpoint of matter to the standpoint of Spirit, we gain the real and tangible. Then we find Soul, and lose all sense of matter, sin, and mortality.
Through false estimates of Soul in sense, and Mind in matter, belief strays into a temporary loss or absence of Soul. This state of error is the mortal dream of Life and Substance in matter, and it is directly opposite to the immortal reality of being. Waking to real Life, mortals find what they have learned from the senses to be reversed in the facts of existence. That which sense deems shadow is found to be substance; and what it deems substance becomes nothingness, when the dreams of the senses vanish, and reality appears.
The parent of all human discord was not God's man, spiritually created. It is a lie to say that man is material and mortal, originated in nothingness and dust, and sprang from matter instead of Spirit. This was the Adam-dream, that Life and Intelligence originated from and passed into matter. This error, first called the Serpent, suggested the opposite of Truth, saying: “I will make ye as gods.” In other words: “There is more than one Mind. I am mind, and there shall be lords and gods many, minds and spirits, both evil and good. Truth shall change sides, and be the opposite of Spirit. God, I will name Matter, and it shall seem to have Life, as much as God, or Spirit, that is Life.”
​This error led to bad results. Its life was found to be not Life, but only a transient sense of sin, that ends in death. Error charged its lie to Truth, and said: “The Lord knows it, — He made man mortal and material, out of matter instead of Spirit;” and thus error partook of its own evil, with this Amen.
When the eternal Spirit made man, he was given dominion over all the earth; and he was never created from a material basis, or bidden to obey material laws that Spirit never made. His government is the higher law of Mind, the spiritual statute. Jesus, understanding spiritual law, and knowing there is no law of matter, said: “These signs shall follow them that believe: Unharmed they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them.” But this understanding of man's power, equipped by Spirit, has sadly disappeared from Christian history.
Our missionaries carry the Bible to India, but can it be said they explain it practically, as Jesus did, when hundreds are dying annually of the bite of serpents?
The decision, by vote of Councils, as to what should be considered Holy Writ; the manifest mistakes in the Septuagint; the thirty thousand different readings in the Old Testament, and the three hundred thousand in the New, — these facts show how a mortal and material sense stole into the divine record, with its own hue darkening to some extent the inspired pages. But mistakes could not wholly obscure the Science of the Scriptures, seen from Genesis to Revelation, or mar the demonstration of Jesus, and annul the healing of the prophets, who doubtless foresaw that “the stone which the builders rejected would become the head of the corner.”
​Jesus of Nazareth was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe. He went beneath the material surface of things, and found their spiritual cause. To accommodate himself to the immature idea of his power, possessed even by his disciples, Jesus called the body which, by his own power, he raised from the grave, “flesh and bones.” To show that the Substance of himself was Spirit, and the body no more perfect because of death, and no less material until the Ascension made it so, he waited until the mortal sense, or flesh, had risen above all earthly yearnings, and relinquished the belief of substance-matter, and the Ego became one with the Father. Then it was that our Master gained the solution of being, that demonstrates the existence of but One Mind, without a second or equal.
The Jews, who sought to kill this man of God, showed plainly that their material views were the parents of their wicked deeds. When Jesus spake of reproducing his body, — knowing, as he did, that Mind was the builder, — and said, “Though you destroy this temple, yet will I build it again,” they thought he referred to a material temple. To such materialists, Spirit, or God, seemed a spectre, unseen and unfamiliar; and the body, which they laid in a sepulchre, seemed to be the substance. This materialism lost sight of the true Jesus; while the faithful Mary saw him, and he presented to her, more than ever before, the true idea of God, Life, and Substance.
Because of men's material and sinful belief, the Spiritual Jesus was imperceptible to them. The higher his demonstration of Divine Science carried the problem of being, and the more distinctly lie uttered the demands of its Principle, — Truth and Love, — the more odious he ​became to the world of belief, depending on doctrines and material law to save them from sin and sickness, and submitting to death as the inevitable law of matter; when Jesus proved this false by his resurrection, and said: “Whosoever liveth, and believeth in me, shall never die.”
That saving of our Master, “I and my Father are one,” separated him from the scholastic theology of the rabbis. His better understanding of God was a rebuke. He knew of but one Mind, and laid no claim to any other. He knew that the Ego was Mind, instead of body, that sin and evil were not Mind; and his understanding of this Divine Science brought upon him the anathemas of the world.
The opposite views of the people hid from their eyes his sonship with God. They could not discern spiritual being. Their carnal minds were at enmity with it. Their thoughts were filled with mortal error, instead of with God's idea as presented by Jesus. The likeness of God we lose sight of through sin, which beclouds the spiritual sense of Truth; and we only regain this likeness as we subdue sin, and regain man's heritage of “dominion over the earth,” the liberty of the sons of God.
The voice of Truth still calls: “Adam, where art thou? Art thou dwelling in the belief that Mind is in matter, and that evil is Mind? or art thou in the living faith of no other Mind but God, and keeping his commandment?” Until the lesson is learned that God is the only Mind, governing man, mortal belief will be afraid, and hide from the demand, “Where art thou?”
If we regard Mind as both good and evil, every supposed pain and pleasure of material sense will answer the above inquiries with dismay, and weigh against our ​course Spiritward. “Adam, where art thou?” is met with the admission, from the head, heart, stomach, blood, nerves: “Lo, here am I, looking for happiness and Life in the body, but finding only an illusion of pleasure, pain, sin, sickness, and death.”
Life, Truth, and Love are not attributes of Deity, but the highest terms we can employ to express Him. They admit of no degrees of comparison. Nothing can be wiser than Wisdom, or truer than Truth. Life and Love have no superiors. Goodness is not equal to the Principle of goodness.
The Hebrew Lawgiver, slow of speech, despaired of making the people understand what should be revealed to him. When led by Wisdom to cast down his rod, and he saw it become a serpent, Moses fled before it; but Wisdom bade him come back and handle the serpent, and then his fear departed. In this incident was seen the actuality of Science. Matter was found to be a belief only. The serpent, under Wisdom's bidding, became a symbol of strength, a staff upon which to lean. The illusion of Moses lost its power to alarm him, when he discovered that whatsoever he apparently saw was but a different phase of mortal belief.
It was established as a fact that leprosy was a creation of mortal mind, and not matter, when Moses put his hand into his bosom and drew it forth white as snow, and presently restored it to its natural condition by the same simple process. God had lessened his fear by this proof of Christian Science, and the inward voice became to him the voice of God, which said: “It shall come to pass, if they will not hear thee, neither hearken to the voice of the first sign, that they will believe the voice ​of the latter.” And so it was in the coming centuries, when the Science of Being was demonstrated by Jesus, and he showed his students the power of Mind, by changing water into wine, and taught them how to handle serpents unharmed, to heal the sick, and cast out error. So they understood the supremacy of Spirit.
The mission of Jesus confirmed prophecy, and explained the so-called miracles of olden time as the demonstration of divine power. This established his claim to the Messiahship. In reply to John's inquiry, “Art thou he that should come?” he returned a brief affirmative, by recounting deeds instead of repeating his words, confident that this exhibition of the divine power would fully answer that question to one who had prophesied the Messianic appearing. This was therefore his reply: “Go and show John these things which ye both see and hear: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk; and blessed is he who shall not be offended in me.” In other words, he gave his benediction to whomsoever should not deny that these manifestations of divine power proved Christ's unity with God, the Divine Principle that adjusts the harmony of being.
That they might prove their Christianity, Jesus instructed his disciples to heal the sick through Mind, knowing that Truth would cast out error, and thus restore the equilibrium of the human organism. This is the philosophy of Christian cure.
In Latin the word rendered disciple signifies student; and the word indicates that healing was not a supernatural gift to these learners, but their cultivated understanding of the Divine Science taught by their Master. Hence the wide meaning of his saying: “Neither pray ​I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me [understand me] through their word.”
Metaphors abound in the Bible, and names are often expressive of spiritual ideas. The most distinguished theologians in Europe and America (among whom may be counted Dean Stanley, Dr. J. B. Lightfoot, Prof. D. W. Marks) agree that the Scriptures have both a spiritual and literal significance. In Smith's Bible Dictionary it is said: “The spiritual interpretation of Scripture must rest upon both the literal and moral;” and the following text is quoted from the original: “Jehovah said, My Spirit shall not forever rule (or be humbled) in men, seeing that they are [or, in their error they are] but flesh.” The spiritual fact of being, even man's eternal and harmonious existence as idea instead of matter, (however transcendental appears such a thought,) was not forever to be humbled by the belief that man is flesh and matter, for in that error he is mortal.
The Divine Science taught in the original language of the Bible came through inspiration, and needs inspiration to be understood. Hence the misapprehension of its spiritual meaning, and the misstatement of the Word, in some instances, by uninspired writers, who were but transcribing what an inspired teacher had said. A misplaced word might change the sense and misstate the Science of the Scriptures: as, for instance, to say “the Love of God,” instead of “God is love;” or to say “the Truth of God,” when it is meant that God is Truth; or to refer to the Life of God, when Jesus plainly declared, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” The way is strait and narrow that leads to the understanding that God is Life. It is a warfare with the ​flesh, whereby we must conquer sin, sickness, and death, now or hereafter, but certainly before we can reach the goal of Spirit, or Life, as God.
The one important interpretation of Scripture is the spiritual. For instance, the text, “In my flesh shall I see God,” gives a profound idea of the divine power to heal the ills of the flesh, and encourages mortals to hope in Him who healeth all our diseases; whereas this passage is continually quoted as if Job intended to declare that if disease and worms destroyed his body, yet in the latter days he should stand perfected before Jehovah, clad in material flesh, — an interpretation which is just the opposite of the true, as may be traced throughout the entire statement of Christian Science.
The Soul-inspired patriarchs heard the voice of Truth, and talked with God as consciously as man talks with man.
Jacob wrestled with a man — not with a bodily personality, but with the senses. He wrestled “until daybreak,” until the light of Divine Science revealed this great fact of being, that matter has no sensation, that man is spiritual, pure as his Maker, and not halt or blind. When this Divine Science dawned upon Jacob he saw that man was in the image of God's purity and perfection. Jacob also saw that, as such, man could not be maimed, or lose one jot of his completeness. Then Jacob arose in the majesty of his Maker, the One Mind, to destroy the error of material belief that there are minds many; and thus the patriarch reflected his own spiritual origin.
The result of his struggle then appeared. He had conquered material belief with the understanding of Spirit. This spiritual being changed the man. He was no ​longer called Jacob, but Israel, — a Prince of God, or a Soldier of God, who had fought a good fight. He was to become the father of those who followed his spiritual demonstration of Christian striving; and the children of earth who followed his example should be called the Children of Israel. If these children should go astray, and forget the spiritual foundation of God's people, and thus lose the divine power that heals the sick and sinning, they must be brought back through great tribulation, and led to deny this material sense, and become spiritually-minded.
Jesus' spiritual origin and understanding enabled him to demonstrate the facts of being; to prove, above all other teachers, how spiritual Truth destroys material error, heals the sick, and overcomes death. The birth of Jesus pointed to this Truth, and presented the example of creation. Jesus illustrated, more than any other man, the ideal of Spirit, inasmuch as he was more spiritual than all other earthly impersonations combined. He walked the waves, multiplied the loaves and fishes, healed the sick, and raised the dead, all on the divine platform — that God, Spirit, is supreme, and that there is no other power than Mind.
Having in part a personal origin, conceived by a human mother, Jesus was the mediator between Spirit and what is termed matter, between Truth and error. Explaining and demonstrating the way of Divine Science, he became the way of salvation to all who accepted his word, that mortals might learn of him and escape from evil. Man being linked by Science to his Maker, mortals need only turn from sin and be His. Jesus took upon himself flesh, to prove the power of Spirit over the ​flesh; to show that Truth is made manliest upon the human mind and body, healing sickness and sin.
Jesus presented this true idea of God. Hence the war fare between this spiritual idea and scholasticism, between apostolic clear-sightedness and the blindness of popular belief, which led to the conclusion that the spiritual idea could be killed by crucifying the flesh. The Christ-idea, like the Christ-man, rose higher because of the crucifixion, and proved beyond a question that Truth was the master of death. Jesus presented indestructible the man that Spirit creates, constitutes, and governs; illustrating, also, that blending with the Maker which gives Divine Science dominion over all the earth.
Paul writes, “If Christ [Truth] be not risen, then is my preaching vain;” i. e. If this idea of the supremacy of Spirit, which is a true conception of being, come not to your thought, you cannot be benefited by what I say. Jesus said substantially, “He that believeth in me shall not see death:” i. e. He who perceives the true idea of Life loses all sense of death; he who has the right idea of Good loses his sense of evil, and, by reason of this, is ushering himself into the realities of Spirit that never die. Such an one abideth in Life, Life obtained not of the body, incapable of supporting Life, but of Truth, that develops its own immortal idea. Jesus gave the true idea of Life, that results in infinite blessings to mortals.
In Colossians (iii. 4) Paul writes “When Christ, our Life, shall appear [be manifested], then shall ye also appear [be manifested] with him in glory.” When spiritual being is understood in all its perfection, continuity, and might, then shall we be like Christ.
​The interior meaning of the apostolic words is this: Then shall man be found perfect as the Father, indestructible in his Life, “hid, with the Christ, in God,” where human sense hath not seen it, — safe in the Divine Principle.
The idea of God, presented by Jesus, was scourged in person as in Principle; and that man was accounted criminal who could prove God's powerful reality by healing the sick, casting out error, spiritualizing materialistic beliefs, raising the dead — dead in trespasses and sins, resting on the basis of matter, and blind to the perception of Spirit, or Truth.
The Pharisees of old thrust the spiritual idea, and the man that bore it, out of their synagogues, and retained their materialistic beliefs about God. To-day, as of yore, unconscious of the reappearing of the spiritual idea, religionists shut the door upon it, and condemn the cure of the sick and sinful, if it be wrought on any but a material theory. Prophesying this rejection of the true idea of God, — this salvation from all error, physical and mental, — Jesus asked, “When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on earth?”
Paul had a clear sense of the demands of Truth upon mortals, physically and spiritually, when he said, “Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” But he who was begotten of the beliefs of the flesh, or served them, could never reach, in this world, the divine heights of his Master. The time cometh when the spiritual origin of man, the Spirit that ushered Jesus into human presence, will be understood and demonstrated. When first spoken in any age, Truth, like the light, “shineth ​in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.” The false sense of Life, Substance, and Mind hides their possibilities, and conceals scientific demonstration.
Materia medica substitutes drugs for the power of God — even the might of Mind — to heal the body. Scholastic theology clings to the person, instead of the Divine Principle, of the man Jesus to save, while his Science, the curative agent of God, is silenced. Why? Because Science divests material drugs of their imaginary power, and clothes Spirit with supremacy over every ill that flesh is heir to. Science is “the stranger within our gates,” remembered not, even when its elevating effects prove practically its divine origin and efficiency.
Theology should include healing the sick; since our Master's first article of faith was healing, and he proved his faith by his works. The ancient Christians were healers. Why has this element of Christianity been lost? Because, I regret to say, our systems of religion are governed more or less by our systems of medicine. The first idolatry was faith in matter. The schools have rendered faith in drugs the fashion, rather than faith in Deity. Trusting matter to destroy its own discord, harmony has been lost. Such systems are barren of the vitality of spiritual production, whereby sense becomes the servant of Science.
Jesus never spake of disease as dangerous, or difficult to treat. When his students brought to him cases they had failed to heal, he said unto them, “Oh ye of little faith!” implying that the requisite power was in Mind. He prescribed no drugs, urged no obedience to so-called material laws, but acted in direct disobedience thereto.
​He uttered things that had been “secret from the foundation of the world;” that is, ever since knowledge usurped the throne of the creative Principle, and insisted on the might of matter and the insignificance of Spirit.
The Master forbore not to declare the whole Truth, telling just what would destroy sickness, sin, and death; although his declaration set households at variance, and brought to their material beliefs no peace, but a sword.
Whoever declares “the Truth as it is in Jesus” will share in a degree the Master's experiences. Resistance to Truth will follow his steps, and he will incur the hatred of error, till “Wisdom is justified of her children.” These blessed benedictions rest upon his followers: “If the world hate you, ye may know that it hated me before it hated you;” “Lo I am with you always;” i. e. not only in all time, but in all ways, or conditions.
The sharp experiences of the error of supposititious Life in matter — our disappointments and ceaseless woes — turn us, as tired children, to spiritual Love. Then we begin to learn Life in Divine Science. Without this process of weaning, “who by searching can find out God?” It is easier to desire Truth than to rid one's self of error. Mortals may seek the understanding of Christian Science, but shall not be able to glean from it the facts of being without laboring for them. This strife consists in the endeavor to destroy error of every kind, and possess no other Mind but God.
Through the wholesome chastisements of Love we are helped onward in the march towards righteousness and purity, which are the footsteps of Science. Pausing before the infinite tasks of Truth we rest for a moment; ​then push onward, until boundless thought walks enraptured, and conception unconfined is winged to reach the divine glory.
The true idea of God gives the true Love and Life, robs the grave of victory, takes away all sin, and the delusion that there are other gods, and leads mortals to the feet of Love.
The individuality of our Master was no less tangible because it was spiritual, and because his Life was not at the mercy of matter. This understanding made him more real, more formidable in Truth; and enabled him to triumph over death, and present himself to his disciples, after his resurrection from the grave, the self-same Jesus whom they had loved before the tragedy of Calvary.
To the materialistic Thomas, looking for the ideal Saviour in matter instead of in Spirit, and to the evidence of the senses and the body, more than to Soul, for an earnest of immortality, — to him Jesus furnished the proof that he was unchanged by the crucifixion. To this stupid, doubting disciple Jesus therefore remained a fleshly reality, so long as he remained an inhabitant of the earth. Nothing but a belief in matter could make existence apparent to Thomas. For him to believe in matter was no task; but for him to conceive of the Substance of Spirit, — to know that nothing can rule out Mind and immortality, wherein Spirit is found, — was more difficult.
What is termed material sense mistakes the motive and manifestation of being; whereas spiritual sense cannot make this mistake. To material sense the falsehood is the fact, until sense is rectified by Science.
​Human belief is an autocrat, though undeserving of power. It says to mortals “You are wretched,” and they are so; and no circumstance can change their state until this belief changes. It says “You are happy,” and they are so; and no circumstance can alter the situation until their beliefs on this subject change. It is as necessary for a health-illusion, as for an illusion of sickness, to be instructed out of itself, into the understanding of what constitutes health; for a change in either belief affects the human condition.
Mortal mind judges by the evidence before the material senses, until Science makes clear the opposite evidence. An improved belief is one step out of error, and aids in gaining a mastery of the situation. Paul was not at first a disciple of Jesus, but a persecutor of his followers. Until the Truth appeared to him in Science he was blind, and his blindness was felt; but spiritual light enabled him to follow the example and teachings of Jesus, healing the sick and introducing Christianity throughout Asia Minor, Greece, and even into the proud city of Rome.
If we would follow Christ, Truth, it must be in the way of his appointing. Jesus said, “The works that I do ye shall do.” He who would reach the source, and find the divine remedy for every ill, must not climb the hill of Science by some other way. All nature teaches love to God; but we cannot love Him supremely, and set our whole affections on spiritual things, while loving the material, or trusting to it, more than to Truth.
A little leaven leavens the whole lump. A little understanding of Christian Science proves the truth of ​all that I have said of it. Because you cannot walk the wave and raise the dead, you have no right to question the ability of Divine Science. Be thankful that Jesus did this, who was its true demonstrator, and left his example for us. We should attempt no more than we understand, and prove our faith by our works.
One should not tarry in the storm if the body is freezing, or stand in the flames that devour. Unable to prevent such results, one should avoid their occasion. To do otherwise would be to resemble a pupil in addition attempting to solve a problem of Euclid, who should deny the Principle of the problem, because he failed in the effort.
Our theories of personality are based on finite premises, that cannot penetrate beyond matter. A limited sense of God or man necessarily limits faith and prevents understanding. It divides faith and understanding between matter and Spirit, the finite and the Infinite, and so turns away from the infinite healing Principle to the inanimate drug.
The use of drugs originated in idolatry, with pagan priests, who besought the gods to heal the sick, and designated Apollo as the god of medicine. He was supposed to dictate the first prescription, according to the “History of Four Thousand Years of Medicine.” It is here noticeable that Apollo was also regarded as the sender of disease. Hippocrates turned from image-gods to vegetable and mineral drugs for healing. This was deemed progress, but it ought to be understood as only introducing another form of mythology and pagan worship. The fate of medicine, and its history, should correspond with that of its god, Apollo, who was banished ​from heaven, and endured great sufferings on earth. Truly has it been written: —
* . . . . . All these things
* Are but brief voices, breathed on shifting strings.
We must forsake the foundation of material systems, however time-honored, if we would gain Christ as our only Saviour. Not partially, but fully, this healer of mortal mind was the healer of the body. The varied doctrines and theories that presuppose Life and Intelligence in matter are but ancient and modern mythologies. Belief in intelligent matter is atheism, that Science will put down. “In those days there will be tribulation such as has not been since the beginning;” and earth will echo the cry, “Why art thou [Truth] come hither to torment us before the time?”
Ignorance, pride, and prejudice close the door to whatever is not stereotyped. When the Science of Being is understood, every man will be his own physician, and Truth be found the universal panacea. Life demonstrates Life. The universal belief in death is of no advantage. It cannot make Life or Truth apparent. Death will be found at length to be a mortal dream, that comes in darkness and disappears with light.
Incorrect reasoning leads to practical error. The wrong thought should be arrested before it can be made manifest.
There is no hypocrisy in Science. Principle is imperative; you cannot mock it by human will. Science is a divine demand, not a human. Always right, its Principle never repents, never dishonors the claim of Truth by forgiveness. Through understanding it destroys ​error, but never pardons it. If men understood their real divine source to be all blessedness, they would have immediate recourse to the divine and be at peace; but the deeper the error into which mortal mind is plunged, the more intense the opposition to Truth.
What a pitiful sight is malice finding pleasure in revenge! Evil is sometimes a man's highest conception of good, until his grasp on goodness grows stronger. Then he loses pleasure in wickedness, and it becomes his torment. The way to escape the misery of sin is to cease sinning. There is no other way. Sin is the image of the beast, to be effaced by the sweat of agony. It is a moral madness, that rushes forth to clamor with midnight and the tempest. To physical sense the strict demands of Moral Science seem peremptory; but mortals are hastening to learn that Life is God, or good, and that evil has rightly neither place nor power in human economy.
The Sadducees reasoned falsely about the resurrection; but not blindly as the Pharisees, who received error as if it were immortal as Truth. For the Pharisees would resurrect the spiritual from the material. They would first make Life result in death, and then have a material death reproduce spiritual Life. Jesus taught them how death was to be overcome by spiritual Life, and demonstrated this beyond cavil. The immortality of Soul makes man immortal. If Soul were parted for a moment from its reflection, man, during that moment there would be no self-existent Principle. The Ego would be unexpressed, and God and man would be without identity.
If Soul and its representative, man, unite only for a period, to be then separated as by a law of divorce, and brought together again at some uncertain time and in ​a manner unknown (and this is what religion commonly teaches), we are left without a rational proof of immortality. But God cannot be separated for an instant from man, the reflection of Himself. This knowledge holds our existence to be intact. All the myriad forms of mortal thought, made manifest as matter, are not more distinct or real, to the so-called material senses, than the forms that Soul creates are to spiritual sense, where Life is permanent.
The footsteps of Christian Science are not so much seen as felt. The “still, small voice” of Truth is uttering itself. We are either turning away from this utterance, or we are yielding to it and going up higher. To become as a little child, willing to leave the old for the new, renders thought receptive of the advanced idea. Gladness to leave the old landmarks, and willingness to let them disappear, this disposition precipitates the ultimate harmony. The purification of sense and self is a proof of progress; for none but “the pure in heart shall see God.”
Angels are not etherealized human beings, evincing animal qualities; but they are celestial visitants, who fly on spiritual pinions, not material. They are pure thoughts, winged with Truth and Love. Human conjecture confers upon them its own forms of thought, marked with superstitious outlines, making them human creatures with suggestive wings; but this is only fancy. It has behind it no more reality than has the sculptor when he carves his statue of Liberty — an image which embodies his conception of an unseen quality or condition, but which has no personal antecedent reality, save in the artist's own “chambers of imagery.”
​My angels are exalted thoughts, appearing at the door of some sepulchre where illusion has buried its fondest earthly hopes. With white lingers they point upward to a new and glorified trust, a higher ideal of Life and its joys. Angels are God's impartations to man, — not messengers, or persons, but messages of the true idea of divinity flowing into humanity. These upward-soaring thoughts never lead mortals toward self or sin, but guide them to the Principle of all good, whither every pure and uplifting aspiration tends. We should give earnest heed to these spiritual guides. Then they will tarry, and we shall be found entertaining angels unawares.
In order to apprehend more, we must put into practice what we already have. We must recollect that Truth is demonstrable, when understood, and not understood until demonstrated. If “faithful over a few things” we shall be made rulers over many, but the one unused talent moulds and is lost. When the sick or the sinful waken to realize their need of what they have not, they will be receptive of Divine Science, — which gravitates to Soul, and away from material sense, removes thought from the body, and elevates to the contemplation of something better than disease, or sin.
Spiritual sense is intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition. Material sense is human belief, fear, doubt, despair. This belief, alternating between a sense of pleasure and pain, between hope and fear, between life and death, never readies beyond the boundary of the unreal. When the real, that is announced by Science, is attained, joy is no longer a trembler, nor hope a cheat.
The purpose and motive to live aright can be gained to-day. This point won, you have started as you should ​You have begun at the numeration-table of Christian Science, and nothing but wrong intention can hinder your advancement. Working and praying, with true motives on your part, your Father will open the way. “If ye would run, who shall hinder you?” In this spirit are the lines of Mrs. Hemans: —
* Is it not much that I may worship Him,
* With nought my spirit's breathings to control,
* And feel His presence in the vast and dim
* And whispering woods, where dying thunders roll
* From the far cataracts? Shall I not rejoice
* That I have learned at last to know His voice
* From man's ? — I will rejoice! My soaring Soul
* Now hath redeemed her birthright of the day,
* And won, through clouds, to Him, her own unfettered way!
Saul of Tarsus only beheld the way, — the Christ, or Truth, — when his uncertain sense of right had changed to a spiritual sense that is always right. Then the man was changed. Thought assumed a nobler standpoint and became more spiritual. Then Paul learned the wrong he had done in persecuting Christianity, which he had not understood. He beheld for the first time the true idea of Love, and learned a lesson of Divine Science.
Truth never destroys its own idea. It is the Substance, that cannot destroy its own reflection. A personal sense, or error, may hide Truth, health, and harmony, as the mist obscures the mountain; but Science never obscures the celestial peaks.
Man's wisdom finds no satisfaction in sin, but personal sense finds pleasure therein. The drunkard thinks he enjoys drunkenness; and you cannot make the inebriate leave his besottedness, until his personal sense of pleasure ​yields to a higher sense. Then he turns from his cups, as the startled dreamer that wakens from an incubus incurred through the pains of distorted sense. Man liking to do wrong — finding pleasure in it, and refraining from it only through fear of consequences — is neither a safe temperance man nor a reliable religionist.
Reform comes by understanding that there is no abiding pleasure in evil; and by gaining an affection for goodness according to Science, which reveals the immortal fact that neither pleasure nor pain, appetite nor passion, exists in or of matter, while the Divine Mind can and does destroy the false sense of pleasure and of fear, and all the appetites of the human mind.
The fear of punishment never made man truly honest. Moral courage is requisite to meet the wrong and proclaim the right. But how shall we reform the man who has more animal than moral courage, who has less Soul, because he has more material sense? Through my method of silent argument, convince his reason of its mistaken means for procuring happiness. Perhaps reason is his highest human faculty. Let that inform the sentiments, and awaken his dormant sense of moral obligation; and by degrees he will learn the nothingness of the pleasures of human sense, and the grandeur and bliss of a diviner sense that is superior to matter. Then he is saved.
A picture in the camera, or a face reflected in the mirror, is not the original, though resembling it. Man, in the likeness of his Creator, reflects the central light of being, the impersonal God. As there is no gender in the mirrored form, which is but a reflection, so gender belongs to God, and is in the Principle, not the body of ​
man. Gender is a form, a quality, a characteristic of Mind, not of matter.
Man is not a creator, though he reflects Mind's creations, which constitute the underlying reality of Science. The inverted method, the deflections of matter, as opposed to the Science of spiritual reflection, are all unlike Spirit. With the illusion of error, of life that is here to-day and gone to-morrow, man would be wholly mortal, were it not for the Truth, the Divine Principle, gained through the Science taught and demonstrated by Jesus, destroying all error and bringing immortality to light. Because man is the reflection of his Maker, he is not subject to birth, growth, maturity, decay. These illusions are of human origin, not divine.
If man were solely a creature of the senses, the Principle which he reflects would also be merely mutable and mortal. Human logic is awry when it attempts to draw spiritual conclusions from matter. Finite sense has no correct appreciation of the Infinite Principle, God, or of the infinite idea or reflection, man.
People go into ecstasies over the idea of a personal Jehovah, though without a spark of love in their hearts; when in fact God is Love, and without this trait mortality cannot lay hold of Immortality. Men believe without understanding Truth, when God is Truth. He is Divine Principle, and cannot be demonstrated without understanding.
Mortals suppose they live without being good, when goodness, or God, is the only real Life. What is the result? Understanding little about the Divine Principle that saves and heals, mortals get rid of sin, sickness, and death only in seeming. These errors are not thus ​really destroyed, and must therefore cling to mortals until, here or hereafter, they gain the true understanding of God, in the Science which destroys human delusions about Him, and reveals the grand realities of being.
All that is called mortal thought consists of error. The theoretical mind (the exact opposite of the real Mind) is named by error Material Life. Error teaches that mortals are created to suffer and die. When man is dead, error hopes to raise from mortality the immortal Principle, the Soul. Thus error theorizes that whatever is born of the dust returns to dust, and has a resurrection from the dust; whereas properly considered, man is the spiritual and eternal reflection of Deity.
Undisturbed amid this jargon of personal sense, Science sits enthroned, ready to unfold to mortals the immutable harmonious divine Principle — Life and its idea, man and the universe — as ever present and eternal.