Ashland tidings. [volume] (Ashland, Or.) 1876-1919, 1916-05-01

which senses are wholly material
hence the carnal mind being materia
can not comprehend nor cognize the
things of Spirit.
1t is these material elemenets com.
posing the human mind that cause il
to see everything as material. Being
material, it thinks in terms of mat
ter and is incapable of thinking in
terms of Spirit. BY an inevitable re-
) versal it reduces everything to the
dead level Of matter in order to com.
prehend 1t.
1t is due to this materiality that
the human mind is incapable OF
thinking of God wholly as Spirit, and
therefore, in its material belief, il
reverses the nature and character OF
God, and converts Him into a mater.
ial man, seated upon a material
throne up in the sky. Likewise, be-
cause of this same material element,
the human mind is incapable of
thinking of the kingdom of God as a
spiritual state of consciousness
which Jesus declared sis within YOU"
and transforms it in belief into a
material place somewhere in the sky,
with trappings of material splendor
such as one would expect to find in
the palaces of men.
Since the human mind is prevented
by its own materia,ity from even
comprehending God as Spirit and the
kingdom of Heaven as a spiritual
state of consciousness, it is equally
incapable of thinking of man as a
spiritual being. By reason of the
same inevitable reversal it thinks of
man as material, and hence sees him
as such.
But no matter how sincerely people
may believe that God is a magnified
man, seated upon a material throne,
and having material habitation in
material pace called Heaven, such
belief does not make it true. God is
spirit, and his universe is wholly
spiritual. There is not one material
element in him nor in anything that
he created. He did not create matter
in any form, nor did he create a ma
terial man. God created everything
spiritually and not materially, and
the only kind of man created by him
was the perfect spiritual man, made
in his own image and likeness, pre-
cisely as described in the first chapter
of Genesis.
The Adam-man is not the image of
God, and it is nowhere stated in the
second account of the creation in the
second chapter of Genesis that the
Adam-man was made in Gods image
and likeness, or that he was made
perfect. Those statements are to be
found in the first chapter, and are
used in relation to the real man. But
in spite of this, people have gone on
believing that the Bible taught that
Adam was made in Gods image.
Christian Science is the only sys-
TEN of teaching that know anything
about that even makes an attempt to
explain the difference between man
and the Adam-man, and it does ex-
plain it and makes it perfectly plain,
by pointing out, as has already been
said, that the Adam-man is merely
the ia Se, material misconcept of man.
1t is as though one were to look
through green eyeglasses. AS long
as he did so, everything would ap-
pear to be green. If he were to try
to remove the green from an object,
he could not do so, for the reason
that the green was not in the object
though appearing to be there, but
was in the lens through which he
looked at it. The only thing neces-
sary for him to do in order to trans
late the entire green universe back |
into its normal aspect would be mere
ly to take off the green lenses.
In precisely the same way the ma
terial universe and material man are
translated back into the spiritual,
where in fact they have always been,
by merely taking off the material
through which we have
looked at them. If it were conceiv-
able that one could now rid himself
Of every material element in his men
ta,ity, and of every sin and false be-
lief, so that nothing remained in his
except the spirituaized
thought, he would not then see his
fellow man as material, but would
see him for what he really is, namely,
the perfect spiritual child of God.