Contents
Preface
Chapter I – Prayer
Chapter II – Atonement and Eucharist
Chapter III – Marriage
Chapter IV – Christian Science Versus Spiritualism
Chapter V – Animal Magnetism Unmasked
Chapter VI – Science, Theology, Medicine
Chapter VII – Physiology
Chapter VIII – Footsteps of Truth
Chapter IX – Creation
Chapter X – Science of Being
Chapter XI – Some Objections Answered
Chapter XII – Christian Science Practice
Chapter XIII – Teaching Christian Science
Chapter XIV – Recapitulation
Chapter XV – Genesis
Chapter XVI – The Apocalypse
Chapter XVII – Glossary
Chapter XVIII – Fruitage
PREFACE
To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings. The wakeful shepherd beholds the first faint morning beams, ere cometh the full radiance of a risen day. So shone the pale star to the prophet shepherds; yet it traversed the night, and came where, in cradled obscurity, lay the Bethlehem babe, the human herald of Christ, Truth, who would make plain to benighted understanding the way of salvation through Christ Jesus, till across a night of error should dawn the morning beams and shine the guiding star of being. The Wisemen were led to behold and to follow this daystar of divine Science, lighting the way to eternal harmony. The time for thinkers has come. Truth, independent of doctrines and time-honored systems, knocks at the portal of humanity. Contentment with the past and the cold conventionality of materialism are crumbling away. Ignorance of God is no longer the steppingstone to faith. The only guarantee of obedience is a right apprehension of Him whom to know aright is Life eternal. Though empires fall, “the Lord shall reign forever.” A book introduces new thoughts, but it cannot make them speedily understood. It is the task of the sturdy pioneer to hew the tall oak and to cut the rough granite. Future ages must declare what the pioneer has accomplished.
Since the author’s discovery of the might of Truth in the treatment of disease as well as of sin, her system has been fully tested and has not been found wanting; but to reach the heights of Christian Science, man must live in obedience to its divine Principle. To develop the full might of this Science, the discords of corporeal sense must yield to the harmony of spiritual sense, even as the science of music corrects false tones and gives sweet concord to sound.
Theology and physics teach that both Spirit and matter are real and good, whereas the fact is that Spirit is good and real, and matter is Spirit’s opposite. The question, What is Truth, is answered by demonstration, by healing both disease and sin; and this demonstration shows that Christian healing confers the most health and makes the best men. On this basis Christian Science will have a fair fight. Sickness has been combated for centuries by doctors using material remedies; but the question arises, Is there less sickness because of these practitioners? A vigorous “No” is the response deducible from two connate facts,–the reputed longevity of the Antediluvians, and the rapid multiplication and increased violence of diseases since the flood.
In the author’s work, RETROSPECTION AND INTROSPECTION, may be found a biographical sketch, narrating experiences which led her, in the year 1866, to the discovery of the system that she denominated Christian Science. As early as 1862 she began to write down and give to friends the results of her Scriptural study, for the Bible was her sole teacher; but these compositions were crude, the first steps of a child in the newly discovered world of Spirit.
She also began to jot down her thoughts on the main subject, but these jottings were only infantile lispings of Truth. A child drinks in the outward world through the eyes and rejoices in the draught. He is as sure of the world’s existence as he is of his own; yet he cannot describe the world. He finds a few words, and with these he stammeringly attempts to convey his feeling. Later, the tongue voices the more definite thought, though still imperfectly. So was it with the author. As a certain poet says of himself, she “lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.” Certain essays written at that early date are still in circulation among her first pupils; but they are feeble attempts to state the Principle and practice of Christian healing, and are not complete nor satisfactory expositions of Truth. To-day, though rejoicing in some progress, she still finds herself a willing disciple at the heavenly gate, waiting for the Mind of Christ.
Her first pamphlet on Christian Science was copyrighted in 1870 ; but it did not appear in print until 1876, as she had learned that this Science must be demonstrated by healing, before a work on the subject could be profitably studied. From 1867 until 1875, copies were, however, in friendly circulation.
Before writing this work, SCIENCE AND HEALTH, she made copious notes of Scriptural exposition, which have never been published. This was during the years 1867 and 1868. These efforts show her comparative ignorance of the stupendous Life-problem up to that time, and the degrees by which she came at length to its solution; but she values them as a parent may treasure the memorials of a child’s growth, and she would not have them changed.
The first edition of SCIENCE AND HEALTH was published in 1875. Various books on mental healing have since been issued, most of them incorrect in theory and filled with plagiarisms from SCIENCE AND HEALTH. They regard the human mind as a healing agent, whereas this mind is not a factor in the Principle of Christian Science. A few books, however, which are based on this book, are useful.
The author has not compromised conscience to suit the general drift of thought, but has bluntly and honestly given the text of Truth. She has made no effort to embellish, elaborate, or treat in full detail so infinite a theme. By thousands of well-authenticated cases of healing, she and her students have proved the worth of her teachings. These cases for the most part have been abandoned as hopeless by regular medical attendants. Few invalids will turn to God till all physical supports have failed, because there is so little faith in His disposition and power to heal disease.
The divine Principle of healing is proved in the personal experience of any sincere seeker of Truth. Its purpose is good, and its practice is safer and more potent than that of any other sanitary method. The unbiased Christian thought is soonest touched by Truth, and convinced of it. Only those quarrel with her method who do not understand her meaning, or discerning the truth, come not to the light lest their works be reproved. No intellectual proficiency is requisite in the learner, but sound morals are most desirable.
Many imagine that the phenomena of physical healing in Christian Science present only a phase of the action of the human mind, which action in some unexplained way results in the cure of disease. On the contrary, Christian Science rationally explains that all other pathological methods are the fruits of human faith in matter, faith in the workings, not of Spirit, but of the fleshly mind which must yield to Science.
The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus’ time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation. Now, as then, these mighty works are not supernatural, but supremely natural. They are the sign of Immanuel, or “God with us,” a divine influence ever present in human consciousness and repeating itself, coming now as was promised aforetime,
To preach deliverance to the captives [of sense],
And recovering of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty them that are bruised.
When God called the author to proclaim His Gospel to this age, there came also the charge to plant and water His vineyard.
The first school of Christian Science Mind-healing was started by the author with only one student in Lynn, Massachusetts, about the year 1867. In 1881, she opened the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston, under the seal of the Commonwealth, a law relative to colleges having been passed, which enabled her to get this institution chartered for medical purposes. No charters were granted to Christian Scientists for such institutions after 1883, and up to that date, hers was the only College of this character which had been established in the United States, where Christian Science was first introduced.
During seven years over four thousand students were taught by the author in this College. Meanwhile she was pastor of the first established Church of Christ, Scientist; President of the first Christian Scientist Association, convening monthly; publisher of her own works; and (for a portion of this time) sole editor and publisher of the Christian Science Journal, the first periodical issued by Christian Scientists. She closed her College, October 29, 1889, in the height of its prosperity with a deep-lying conviction that the next two years of her life should be given to the preparation of the revision of SCIENCE AND HEALTH, which was published in 1891. She retained her charter, and as its President, reopened the College in 1899 as auxiliary to her church. Until June 10, 1907, she had never read this book throughout consecutively in order to elucidate her idealism.
In the spirit of Christ’s charity, as one who “hopeth all things, endureth all things,” and is joyful to bear consolation to the sorrowing and healing to the sick, she commits these pages to honest seekers for Truth.
MARY BAKER EDDY
NOTE.–The author takes no patients,
and declines medical consultation.
Chapter I – Prayer
For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.
Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him. – CHRIST JESUS.
THE prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God,–a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love. Regardless of what another may say or think on this subject, I speak from experience. Prayer, watching, and working, combined with self-immolation, are God’s gracious means for accomplishing whatever has been successfully done for the Christianization and health of mankind. Thoughts unspoken are not unknown to the divine Mind. Desire is prayer; and no loss can occur from trusting God with our desires, that they may be moulded and exalted before they take form in words and in deeds.
Right motives
What are the motives for prayer? Do we pray to make ourselves better or to benefit those who hear us, to enlighten the infinite or to be heard of men? Are we benefited by praying? Yes, the desire which goes forth hungering after righteousness is blessed of our Father, and it does not return unto us void.
Deity unchangeable
God is not moved by the breath of praise to do more than He has already done, nor can the infinite do less than bestow all good, since He is unchanging wisdom and Love. We can do more for ourselves by humble fervent petitions, but the All-loving does not grant them simply on the ground of lipservice, for He already knows all.
Prayer cannot change the Science of being, but it tends to bring us into harmony with it. Goodness attains the demonstration of Truth. A request that God will save us is not all that is required. The mere habit of pleading with the divine Mind, as one pleads with a human being, perpetuates the belief in God as humanly circumscribed,–an error which impedes spiritual growth.
God’s standard
God is Love. Can we ask Him to be more? God is intelligence. Can we inform the infinite Mind of anything He does not already comprehend? Do we expect to change perfection? Shall we plead for more at the open fount, which is pouring forth more than we accept? The unspoken desire does bring us nearer the source of all existence and blessedness.
Asking God to be God is a vain repetition. God is “the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever;” and He who is immutably right will do right without being reminded of His province. The wisdom of man is not sufficient to warrant him in advising God.
The spiritual mathematics
Who would stand before a blackboard, and pray the principle of mathematics to solve the problem? The rule is already established, and it is our task to work out the solution. Shall we ask the divine Principle of all goodness to do His own work? His work is done, and we have only to avail ourselves of God’s rule in order to receive His blessing, which enables us to work out our own salvation.
The Divine Being must be reflected by man,–else man is not the image and likeness of the patient, tender, and true, the One “altogether lovely;” but to understand God is the work of eternity, and demands absolute consecration of thought, energy, and desire.
Prayerful ingratitude
How empty are our conceptions of Deity! We admit theoretically that God is good, omnipotent, omnipresent, infinite, and then we try to give information to this infinite Mind. We plead for unmerited pardon and for a liberal outpouring of benefactions. Are we really grateful for the good already received? Then we shall avail ourselves of the blessings we have, and thus be fitted to receive more. Gratitude is much more than a verbal expression of thanks. Action expresses more gratitude than speech.
If we are ungrateful for Life, Truth, and Love, and yet return thanks to God for all blessings, we are insincere and incur the sharp censure our Master pronounces on hypocrites. In such a case, the only acceptable prayer is to put the finger on the lips and remember our blessings. While the heart is far from divine Truth and Love, we cannot conceal the ingratitude of barren lives.
Efficacious petitions
What we most need is the prayer of fervent desire for growth in grace, expressed in patience, meekness, love, and good deeds. To keep the commandments of our Master and follow his example, is our proper debt to him and the only worthy evidence of our gratitude for all that he has done. Outward worship is not of itself sufficient to express loyal and heartfelt gratitude, since he has said: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”
The habitual struggle to be always good is unceasing prayer. Its motives are made manifest in the blessings they bring,–blessings which, even if not acknowledged in audible words, attest our worthiness to be partakers of Love.
Watchfulness requisite
Simply asking that we may love God will never make us love Him; but the longing to be better and holier, expressed in daily watchfulness and in striving to assimilate more of the divine character, will mould and fashion us anew, until we awake in His likeness. We reach the Science of Christianity through demonstration of the divine nature; but in this wicked world goodness will “be evil spoken of,” and patience must bring experience.
Veritable devotion
Audible prayer can never do the works of spiritual understanding, which regenerates; but silent prayer, watchfulness, and devout obedience enable us to follow Jesus’ example. Long prayers, superstition, and creeds clip the strong pinions of love, and clothe religion in human forms. Whatever mate realizes worship hinders man’s spiritual growth and keeps him from demonstrating his power over error.
Sorrow and reformation
Sorrow for wrong-doing is but one step towards reform and the very easiest step. The next and great step required by wisdom is the test of our sincerity, – namely, reformation. To this end we are placed under the stress of circumstances. Temptation bids us repeat the offence, and woe comes in return for what is done. So it will ever be, till we learn that there is no discount in the law of justice and that we must pay “the uttermost farthing.” The measure ye mete “shall be measured to you again,” and it will be full “and running over.”
Saints and sinners get their full award, but not always in this world. The followers of Christ drank his cup. Ingratitude and persecution filled it to the brim; but God pours the riches of His love into the understanding and affections, giving us strength according to our day. Sinners flourish “like a green bay tree;” but, looking farther, the Psalmist could see their end,–the destruction of sin through suffering.
Cancellation of human sin
Prayer is not to be used as a confessional to cancel sin. Such an error would impede true religion. Sin is forgiven only as it is destroyed by Christ,–Truth and Life. If prayer nourishes the belief that sin is cancelled, and that man is made better merely by praying, prayer is an evil. He grows worse who continues in sin because he fancies himself forgiven.
Diabolism destroyed
An apostle says that the Son of God [Christ] came to “destroy the works of the devil.” We should follow our divine Exemplar, and seek the destruction of all evil works, error and disease included.
We cannot escape the penalty due for sin. The Scriptures say, that if we deny Christ, “he also will deny us.”
Pardon and amendment
Divine Love corrects and governs man. Men may pardon, but this divine Principle alone reforms the sinner. God is not separate from the wisdom He bestows. The talents He gives we must improve. Calling on Him to forgive our work badly done or left undone, implies the vain supposition that we have nothing to do but to ask pardon, and that afterwards we shall be free to repeat the offence.
To cause suffering as the result of sin, is the means of destroying sin. Every supposed pleasure in sin will furnish more than its equivalent of pain, until belief in material life and sin is destroyed. To reach heaven, the harmony of being, we must understand the divine Principle of being.
Mercy without partiality
“God is Love.” More than this we cannot ask, higher we cannot look, farther we cannot go. To suppose that God forgives or punishes sin according as His mercy is sought or unsought, is to misunderstand Love and to make prayer the safety-valve for wrong-doing.
Divine severity
Jesus uncovered and rebuked sin before he cast it out. Of a sick woman he said that Satan had bound her, and to Peter he said, “Thou art an offence unto me.” He came teaching and showing men how to destroy sin, sickness, and death. He said of the fruitless tree, “[It] is hewn down.”
It is believed by many that a certain magistrate, who lived in the time of Jesus, left this record: “His rebuke is fearful.” The strong language of our Master confirms this description.
The only civil sentence which he had for error was, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Still stronger evidence that Jesus’ reproof was pointed and pungent is found in his own words,–showing the necessity for such forcible utterance, when he cast out devils and healed the sick and sinning. The relinquishment of error deprives material sense of its false claims.
Audible praying
Audible prayer is impressive; it gives momentary solemnity and elevation to thought. But does it produce any lasting benefit? Looking deeply into these things, we find that “a zeal . . . not according to knowledge” gives occasion for reaction unfavorable to spiritual growth, sober resolve, and wholesome perception of God’s requirements. The motives for verbal prayer may embrace too much love of applause to induce or encourage Christian sentiment.
Emotional utterances
Physical sensation, not Soul, produces material ecstasy and emotion. If spiritual sense always guided men, there would grow out of ecstatic moments a higher experience and a better life with more devout self-abnegation and purity. A selfsatisfied ventilation of fervent sentiments never makes a Christian. God is not influenced by man. The “divine ear” is not an auditory nerve. It is the all-hearing and all-knowing Mind, to whom each need of man is always known and by whom it will be supplied.
Danger from audible prayer
The danger from prayer is that it may lead us into temptation. By it we may become involuntary hypocrites, uttering desires which are not real and consoling ourselves in the midst of sin with the recollection that we have prayed over it or mean to ask forgiveness at some later day. Hypocrisy is fatal to religion.
A wordy prayer may afford a quiet sense of selfjustification, though it makes the sinner a hypocrite. We never need to despair of an honest heart; but there is little hope for those who come only spasmodically face to face with their wickedness and then seek to hide it. Their prayers are indexes which do not correspond with their character. They hold secret fellowship with sin, and such externals are spoken of by Jesus as “like unto whited sepulchres . . . full . . . of all uncleanness.”
Aspiration and love
If a man, though apparently fervent and prayerful, is impure and therefore insincere, what must be the comment upon him? If he reached the loftiness of his prayer, there would be no occasion for comment. If we feel the aspiration, humility, gratitude, and love which our words express,-this God accepts; and it is wise not to try to deceive ourselves or others, for “there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed.” Professions and audible prayers are like charity in one respect,–they “cover the multitude of sins.” Praying for humility with whatever fervency of expression does not always mean a desire for it. If we turn away from the poor, we are not ready to receive the reward of Him who blesses the poor. We confess to having a very wicked heart and ask that it may be laid bare before us, but do we not already know more of this heart than we are willing to have our neighbor see?
Searching the heart
We should examine ourselves and learn what is the affection and purpose of the heart, for in this way only can we learn what we honestly are. If a friend informs us of a fault, do we listen patiently to the rebuke and credit what is said? Do we not rather give thanks that we are “not as other men”? During many years the author has been most grateful for merited rebuke. The wrong lies in unmerited censure,–in the falsehood which does no one any good.
Summit of aspiration
The test of all prayer lies in the answer to these questions: Do we love our neighbor better because of this asking? Do we pursue the old selfish- ness, satisfied with having prayed for something better, though we give no evidence of the sincerity of our requests by living consistently with our prayer? If selfishness has given place to kindness, we shall regard our neighbor unselfishly, and bless them that curse us; but we shall never meet this great duty simply by asking that it may be done. There is a cross to be taken up before we can enjoy the fruition of our hope and faith.
Practical religion
Dost thou “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”? This command includes much, even the surrender of all merely material sensation, affection, and worship. This is the El Dorado of Christianity. It involves the Science of Life, and recognizes only the divine control of Spirit, in which Soul is our master, and material sense and human will have no place.
The chalice sacrificial
Are you willing to leave all for Christ, for Truth, and so be counted among sinners? No! Do you really desire to attain this point? No! Then why make long prayers about it and ask to be Christians, since you do not care to tread in the footsteps of our dear Master? If unwilling to follow his example, why pray with the lips that you may be partakers of his nature? Consistent prayer is the desire to do right.
Prayer means that we desire to walk and will walk in the light so far as we receive it, even though with bleeding footsteps, and that waiting patiently on the Lord, we will leave our real desires to be rewarded by Him.
The world must grow to the spiritual understanding of prayer. If good enough to profit by Jesus’ cup of earthly sorrows, God will sustain us under these sorrows. Until we are thus divinely qualified and are willing to drink his cup, millions of vain repetitions will never pour into prayer the unction of Spirit in demonstration of power and “with signs following.” Christian Science reveals a necessity for overcoming the world, the flesh, and evil, and thus destroying all error.
Seeking is not sufficient. It is striving that enables us to enter. Spiritual attainments open the door to a higher understanding of the divine Life.
Perfunctory prayers
One of the forms of worship in Thibet is to carry a praying-machine through the streets, and stop at the doors to earn a penny by grinding out a prayer. But the advance guard of progress has paid for the privilege of prayer the price of persecution.
Asking amiss
Experience teaches us that we do not always receive the blessings we ask for in prayer. There is some misapprehension of the source and means of all goodness and blessedness, or we should certainly receive that for which we ask. The Scriptures say: “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.” That which we desire and for which we ask, it is not always best for us to receive. In this case infinite Love will not grant the request. Do you ask wisdom to be merciful and not to punish sin? Then “ye ask amiss.”
Without punishment, sin would multiply. Jesus’ prayer, “Forgive us our debts,” specified also the terms of forgiveness. When forgiving the adulterous woman he said, “Go, and sin no more.”
Remission of penalty
A magistrate sometimes remits the penalty, but this may be no moral benefit to the criminal, and at best, it only saves the criminal from one form of punishment. The moral law, which has the right to acquit or condemn, always demands restitution before mortals can “go up higher.” Broken law brings penalty in order to compel this progress.
Truth annihilates error
Mere legal pardon (and there is no other, for divine Principle never pardons our sins or mistakes till they are corrected) leaves the offender free to repeat the offence, if indeed, he has not already suffered sufficiently from vice to make him turn from it with loathing. Truth bestows no pardon upon error, but wipes it out in the most effectual manner. Jesus suffered for our sins, not to annul the divine sentence for an individual’s sin, but because sin brings inevitable suffering.
Desire for holiness
Petitions bring to mortals only the results of mortals’ own faith. We know that a desire for holiness is requisite in order to gain holiness; but if we desire holiness above all else, we shall sac- rifice everything for it. We must be willing to do this, that we may walk securely in the only practical road to holiness. Prayer cannot change the unalterable Truth, nor can prayer alone give us an understanding of Truth; but prayer, coupled with a fervent habitual desire to know and do the will of God, will bring us into all Truth. Such a desire has little need of audible expression. It is best expressed in thought and in life.
Prayer for the sick
“The prayer of faith shall save the sick,” says the Scripture. What is this healing prayer? A mere request that God will heal the sick has no power to gain more of the divine presence than is always at hand. The beneficial effect of such prayer for the sick is on the human mind, making it act more powerfully on the body through a blind faith in God. This, however, is one belief casting out another,–a belief in the unknown casting out a belief in sickness. It is neither Science nor Truth which acts through blind belief, nor is it the human understanding of the divine healing Principle as manifested in Jesus, whose humble prayers were deep and conscientious protests of Truth,–of man’s likeness to God and of man’s unity with Truth and Love.
Prayer to a corporeal God affects the sick like a drug, which has no efficacy of its own but borrows its power from human faith and belief. The drug does nothing, because it has no intelligence. It is a mortal belief, not divine Principle or Love, which causes a drug to be apparently either poisonous or sanative.
The common custom of praying for the recovery of the sick finds help in blind belief, whereas help should come from the enlightened understanding. Changes in belief may go on indefinitely, but they are the merchandise of human thought and not the outgrowth of divine Science.
Love impartial and universal
Does Deity interpose in behalf of one worshipper, and not help another who offers the same measure of prayer? If the sick recover because they pray or are prayed for audibly, only petitioners (per se or by proxy) should get well. In divine Science, where prayers are mental, all may avail them selves of God as “a very present help in trouble.” Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals. It is the open fount which cries, “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.”
Public exaggerations
In public prayer we often go beyond our convictions, beyond the honest standpoint of fervent desire. If we are not secretly yearning and openly striving for the accomplishment of all we ask, our prayers are “vain repetitions,” such as the heathen use. If our petitions are sincere, we labor for what we ask; and our Father, who seeth in secret, will reward us openly. Can the mere public expression of our desires increase them? Do we gain the omnipotent ear sooner by words than by thoughts? Even if prayer is sincere, God knows our need before we tell Him or our fellow-beings about it. If we cherish the desire honestly and silently and humbly, God will bless it, and we shall incur less risk of overwhelming our real wishes with a torrent of words.
Corporeal ignorance
If we pray to God as a corporeal person, this will prevent us from relinquishing the human doubts and fears which attend such a belief, and so we cannot grasp the wonders wrought by infi- nite, incorporeal Love, to whom all things are possible. Because of human ignorance of the divine Principle, Love, the Father of all is represented as a corporeal creator; hence men recognize themselves as merely physical, and are ignorant of man as God’s image or reflection and of man’s eternal incorporeal existence. The world of error is ignorant of the world of Truth,–blind to the reality of man’s existence, – for the world of sensation is not cognizant of life in Soul, not in body.
Bodily presence
If we are sensibly with the body and regard omnipotence as a corporeal, material person, whose ear we would gain, we are not “absent from the body” and “present with the Lord” in the demonstration of Spirit. We cannot “serve two masters.” To be “present with the Lord” is to have, not mere emotional ecstasy or faith, but the actual demonstration and understanding of Life as revealed in Christian Science. To be “with the Lord” is to be in obedience to the law of God, to be absolutely governed by divine Love,–by Spirit, not by matter.
Spiritualized consciousness
Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are purely spiritual,–neither in nor of matter,–and the body will then utter no complaints. If suffering from a belief in sickness, you will find yourself suddenly well. Sorrow is turned into joy when the body is controlled by spiritual Life, Truth, and Love. Hence the hope of the promise Jesus bestows: “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; . . . because I go unto my Father,”–[because the Ego is absent from the body, and present with Truth and Love.] The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer of Soul, not of material sense.
Entirely separate from the belief and dream of material living, is the Life divine, revealing spiritual understanding and the consciousness of man’s dominion over the whole earth. This understanding casts out error and heals the sick, and with it you can speak “as one having authority.”
“When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and,
when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father
which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.”
Spiritual sanctuary
So spake Jesus. The closet typifies the sanctuary of Spirit, the door of which shuts out sinful sense but lets in Truth, Life, and Love. Closed to error, it is open to Truth, and vice versa. The Father in secret is unseen to the physical senses, but He knows all things and rewards according to motives, not according to speech. To enter into the heart of prayer, the door of the erring senses must be closed. Lips must be mute and materialism silent, that man may have audience with Spirit, the divine Principle, Love, which destroys all error.
Effectual invocation
In order to pray aright, we must enter into the closet and shut the door. We must close the lips and silence the material senses. In the quiet sanctuary of earnest longings, we must deny sin and plead God’s allness. We must resolve to take up the cross, and go forth with honest hearts to work and watch for wisdom, Truth, and Love. We must “pray without ceasing.” Such prayer is answered, in so far as we put our desires into practice. The Master’s injunction is, that we pray in secret and let our lives attest our sincerity.
Trustworthy beneficence
Christians rejoice in secret beauty and bounty, hidden from the world, but known to God. Self-forgetfulness, purity, and affection are constant prayers. Practice not profession, understanding not belief, gain the ear and right hand of omnipotence and they assuredly call down infinite blessings. Trustworthiness is the foundation of enlightened faith. Without a fitness for holiness, we cannot receive holiness.
Loftiest adoration
A great sacrifice of material things must precede this advanced spiritual understanding. The highest prayer is not one of faith merely; it is demonstration. Such prayer heals sickness, and must destroy sin and death. It distinguishes between Truth that is sinless and the falsity of sinful sense.
The prayer of Jesus Christ
Our Master taught his disciples one brief prayer, which we name after him the Lord’s Prayer. Our Master said, “After this manner therefore pray ye,” and then he gave that prayer which covers all human needs. There is indeed some doubt among Bible scholars, whether the last line is not an addition to the prayer by a later copyist; but this does not affect the meaning of the prayer itself.
In the phrase, “Deliver us from evil,” the original properly reads, “Deliver us from the evil one.” This reading strengthens our scientific apprehension of the petition, for Christian Science teaches us that “the evil one,” or one evil, is but another name for the first lie and all liars.
Only as we rise above all material sensuousness and sin, can we reach the heaven-born aspiration and spiritual consciousness, which is indicated in the Lord’s Prayer and which instantaneously heals the sick.
Here let me give what I understand to be the spiritual sense of the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father which art in heaven,
Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious,
Hallowed be Thy name.
Adorable One.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy kingdom is come; Thou art ever-present.
Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Enable us to know,–as in heaven, so on earth,–God is omnipotent, supreme.
Give us this day our daily bread;
Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished affections;
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And Love is reflected in love;
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil;
And God leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth
us from sin, disease, and death.
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.
For God is infinite, all-power, all Life, Truth, Love, over all, and All.
Chapter II – Atonement and Eucharist
And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.–PAUL.
For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel.–PAUL.
For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come.–JESUS.
Divine oneness
ATONEMENT is the exemplification of man’s unity with God, whereby man reflects divine Truth, Life, and Love. Jesus of Nazareth taught and demonstrated man’s oneness with the Father, and for this we owe him endless homage. His mission was both individual and collective. He did life’s work aright not only in justice to himself, but in mercy to mortals,–to show them how to do theirs, but not to do it for them nor to relieve them of a single responsibility. Jesus acted boldly, against the accredited evidence of the senses, against Pharisaical creeds and practices, and he refuted all opponents with his healing power.
Human reconciliation
The atonement of Christ reconciles man to God, not God to man; for the divine Principle of Christ is God, and how can God propitiate Himself? Christ is Truth, which reaches no higher than itself. The fountain can rise no higher than its source. Christ, Truth, could conciliate no nature above his own, derived from the eternal Love. It was therefore Christ’s purpose to reconcile man to God, not God to man. Love and Truth are not at war with God’s image and likeness. Man cannot exceed divine Love, and so atone for himself. Even Christ cannot reconcile Truth to error, for Truth and error are irreconcilable. Jesus aided in reconciling man to God by giving man a truer sense of Love, the divine Principle of Jesus’ teachings, and this truer sense of Love redeems man from the law of matter, sin, and death by the law of Spirit,–the law of divine Love.
The Master forbore not to speak the whole truth, declaring precisely what would destroy sickness, sin, and death, although his teaching set households at variance, and brought to material beliefs not peace, but a sword.
Efficacious repentence
Every pang of repentance and suffering, every effort for reform, every good thought and deed, will help us to understand Jesus’ atonement for sin and aid its efficacy; but if the sinner continues to pray and repent, sin and be sorry, he has little part in the atonement,–in the at-one-ment with God,–for he lacks the practical repentance, which reforms the heart and enables man to do the will of wisdom. Those who cannot demonstrate, at least in part, the divine Principle of the teachings and practice of our Master have no part in God. If living in disobedience to Him, we ought to feel no security, although God is good.
Jesus’ sinless career
Jesus urged the commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” which may be rendered: Thou shalt have no belief of Life as mortal; thou shalt not know evil, for there is one Life,- even God, good. He rendered “unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” He at last paid no homage to forms of doctrine or to theories of man, but acted and spake as he was moved, not by spirits but by Spirit.
To the ritualistic priest and hypocritical Pharisee Jesus said, “The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” Jesus’ history made a new calendar, which we call the Christian era; but he established no ritualistic worship. He knew that men can be baptized, partake of the Eucharist, support the clergy, observe the Sabbath, make long prayers, and yet be sensual and sinful.
Perfect example
Jesus bore our infirmities; he knew the error of mortal belief, and “with his stripes [the rejection of error] we are healed.” “Despised and rejected of men,” returning blessing for cursing, he taught mortals the opposite of themselves, even the nature of God; and when error felt the power of Truth, the scourge and the cross awaited the great Teacher. Yet he swerved not, well knowing that to obey the divine order and trust God, saves retracing and traversing anew the path from sin to holiness.
Behest of the cross
Material belief is slow to acknowledge what the spiritual fact implies. The truth is the centre of all religion. It commands sure entrance into the realm of Love. St. Paul wrote, “Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us;” that is, let us put aside material self and sense, and seek the divine Principle and Science of all healing.
Moral victory
If Truth is overcoming error in your daily walk and conversation, you can finally say, “I have fought a good fight . . . I have kept the faith,” because you are a better man. This is having our part in the at-one-ment with Truth and Love. Christians do not continue to labor and pray, expecting because of another’s goodness, suffering, and triumph, that they shall reach his harmony and reward.
If the disciple is advancing spiritually, he is striving to enter in. He constantly turns away from material sense, and looks towards the imperishable things of Spirit. If honest, he will be in earnest from the start, and gain a little each day in the right direction, till at last he finishes his course with joy.
Inharmonious travellers
If my friends are going to Europe, while I am en route for California, we are not journeying together. We have separate time-tables to consult, different routes to pursue. Our paths have diverged at the very outset, and we have little opportunity to help each other. On the contrary, if my friends pursue my course, we have the same railroad guides, and our mutual interests are identical; or, if I take up their line of travel, they help me on, and our companionship may continue.
Zigzag course
Being in sympathy with matter, the worldly man is at the beck and call of error, and will be attracted thitherward. He is like a traveller going westward for a pleasure-trip. The company is alluring and the pleasures exciting. After following the sun for six days, he turns east on the seventh, satisfied if he can only imagine himself drifting in the right direction. Byand-by, ashamed of his zigzag course, he would borrow the passport of some wiser pilgrim, thinking with the aid of this to find and follow the right road.
Moral retrogression
Vibrating like a pendulum between sin and the hope of forgiveness,–selfishness and sensuality causing constant retrogression,–our moral progress will be slow. Waking to Christ’s demand, mortals experience suffering. This causes them, even as drowning men, to make vigorous efforts to save themselves; and through Christ’s precious love these efforts are crowned with success.
Wait for reward
“Work out your own salvation,” is the demand of Life and Love, for to this end God worketh with you. “Occupy till I come!” Wait for your reward, and “be not weary in well doing.” If your endeavors are beset by fearful odds, and you receive no present reward, go not back to error, nor become a sluggard in the race.
When the smoke of battle clears away, you will discern the good you have done, and receive according to your deserving. Love is not hasty to deliver us from temptation, for Love means that we shall be tried and purified.
Deliverance not vicarious
Final deliverance from error, whereby we rejoice in immortality, boundless freedom, and sinless sense, is not reached through paths of flowers nor by pinning one’s faith without works to another’s vicarious effort. Whosoever believeth that wrath is righteous or that divinity is appeased by human suffering, does not understand God.
Justice and substitution
Justice requires reformation of the sinner. Mercy cancels the debt only when justice approves. Revenge is inadmissible. Wrath which is only appeased is not destroyed, but partially indulged. Wisdom and Love may require many sacrifices of self to save us from sin. One sacrifice, however great, is insufficient to pay the debt of sin. The atonement requires constant self-immolation on the sinner’s part. That God’s wrath should be vented upon His beloved Son, is divinely unnatural. Such a theory is man-made. The atonement is a hard problem in theology, but its scientific explanation is, that suffering is an error of sinful sense which Truth destroys, and that eventually both sin and suffering will fall at the feet of everlasting Love.
Doctrines and faith
Rabbinical lore said: “He that taketh one doctrine, firm in faith, has the Holy Ghost dwelling in him.” This preaching receives a strong rebuke in the Scripture, “Faith without works is dead.” Faith, if it be mere belief, is as a pendulum swinging between nothing and something, having no fixity. Faith, advanced to spiritual understanding, is the evidence gained from Spirit, which rebukes sin of every kind and establishes the claims of God.
Self-reliance and confidence
In Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English, faith and the words corresponding thereto have these two definitions, trustfulness and trustworthiness. One kind of faith trusts one’s welfare to others. Another kind of faith understands divine Love and how to work out one’s “own salvation, with fear and trembling.” “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!” expresses the helplessness of a blind faith; whereas the injunction, “Believe . . . and thou shalt be saved!” demands self-reliant trustworthiness, which includes spiritual understanding and confides all to God.
The Hebrew verb to believe means also to be firm or to be constant. This certainly applies to Truth and Love understood and practised. Firmness in error will never save from sin, disease, and death.
Life’s healing currents
Acquaintance with the original texts, and willingness to give up human beliefs (established by hierarchies, and instigated sometimes by the worst passions of men), open the way for Christian Science to be understood, and make the Bible the chart of life, where the buoys and healing currents of Truth are pointed out.
Radical changes
He to whom “the arm of the Lord” is revealed will believe our report, and rise into newness of life with regeneration. This is having part in the atonement; this is the understanding, in which Jesus suffered and triumphed. The time is not distant when the ordinary theological views of atonement will undergo a great change,–a change as radical as that which has come over popular opinions in regard to predestination and future punishment.
Purpose of crucifixion
Does erudite theology regard the crucifixion of Jesus chiefly as providing a ready pardon for all sinners who ask for it and are willing to be forgiven? Does spiritualism find Jesus’ death necessary only for the presentation, after death, of the material Jesus, as a proof that spirits can return to earth? Then we must differ from them both.
The efficacy of the crucifixion lay in the practical affection and goodness it demonstrated for mankind. The truth had been lived among men; but until they saw that it enabled their Master to triumph over the grave, his own disciples could not admit such an event to be possible. After the resurrection, even the unbelieving Thomas was forced to acknowledge how complete was the great proof of Truth and Love.
True flesh and blood
The spiritual essence of blood is sacrifice. The efficacy of Jesus’ spiritual offering is infinitely greater than can be expressed by our sense of human blood. The material blood of Jesus was no more efficacious to cleanse from sin when it was shed upon “the accursed tree,” than when it was flowing in his veins as he went daily about his Father’s business. His true flesh and blood were his Life; and they truly eat his flesh and drink his blood, who partake of that divine Life.
Effective triumph
Jesus taught the way of Life by demonstration, that we may understand how this divine Principle heals the sick, casts out error, and triumphs over death. Jesus presented the ideal of God better than could any man whose origin was less spiritual. By his obedience to God, he demonstrated more spiritually than all others the Principle of being. Hence the force of his admonition, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” Though demonstrating his control over sin and disease, the great Teacher by no means relieved others from giving the requisite proofs of their own piety. He worked for their guidance, that they might demonstrate this power as he did and understand its divine Principle. Implicit faith in the Teacher and all the emotional love we can bestow on him, will never alone make us imitators of him. We must go and do likewise, else we are not improving the great blessings which our Master worked and suffered to bestow upon us. The divinity of the Christ was made manifest in the humanity of Jesus.
Individual experience
While we adore Jesus, and the heart overflows with gratitude for what he did for mortals,–treading alone his loving pathway up to the throne of glory, in speechless agony exploring the way for us, – yet Jesus spares us not one individual experience, if we follow his commands faithfully; and all have the cup of sorrowful effort to drink in proportion to their demonstration of his love, till all are redeemed through divine Love.
Christ’s demonstration
The Christ was the Spirit which Jesus implied in his own statements: “I am the way, the truth, and the life;” “I and my Father are one.” This Christ, or divinity of the man Jesus, was his divine nature, the godliness which animated him. Divine Truth, Life, and Love gave Jesus authority over sin, sickness, and death. His mission was to reveal the Science of celestial being, to prove what God is and what He does for man.
Proof in practice
A musician demonstrates the beauty of the music he teaches in order to show the learner the way by practice as well as precept. Jesus’ teaching and practice of Truth involved such a sacrifice as makes us admit its Principle to be Love. This was the precious import of our Master’s sinless career and of his demonstration of power over death. He proved by his deeds that Christian Science destroys sickness, sin, and death.
Our Master taught no mere theory, doctrine, or belief. It was the divine Principle of all real being which he taught and practised. His proof of Christianity was no form or system of religion and worship, but Christian Science, working out the harmony of Life and Love.
Jesus sent a message to John the Baptist, which was intended to prove beyond a question that the Christ had come: “Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.” In other words: Tell John what the demonstration of divine power is, and he will at once perceive that God is the power in the Messianic work.
Living temple
That Life is God, Jesus proved by his reappearance after the crucifixion in strict accordance with his scientific statement: “Destroy this temple [body], and in three days I [Spirit] will raise it up.” It is as if he had said: The I–the Life, substance, and intelligence of the universe–is not in matter to be destroyed.
Jesus’ parables explain Life as never mingling with sin and death. He laid the axe of Science at the root of material knowledge, that it might be ready to cut down the false doctrine of pantheism,–that God, or Life, is in or of matter.
Recreant disciples
Jesus sent forth seventy students at one time, but only eleven left a desirable historic record. Tradition credits him with two or three hundred other disciples who have left no name. “Many are called, but few are chosen.” They fell away from grace because they never truly understood their Master’s instruction.
Why do those who profess to follow Christ reject the essential religion he came to establish? Jesus’ persecutors made their strongest attack upon this very point. They endeavored to hold him at the mercy of matter and to kill him according to certain assumed material laws.
Help and hindrance
The Pharisees claimed to know and to teach the divine will, but they only hindered the success of Jesus’ mission. Even many of his students stood in his way. If the Master had not taken a student and taught the unseen verities of God, he would not have been crucified. The determination to hold Spirit in the grasp of matter is the persecutor of Truth and Love.
While respecting all that is good in the Church or out of it, one’s consecration to Christ is more on the ground of demonstration than of profession. In conscience, we cannot hold to beliefs outgrown; and by understanding more of the divine Principle of the deathless Christ, we are enabled to heal the sick and to triumph over sin.
Misleading conceptions
Neither the origin, the character, nor the work of Jesus was generally understood. Not a single component part of his nature did the material world measure aright. Even his righteousless and purity did not hinder men from saying: He is a glutton and a friend of the impure, and Beelzebub is his patron.
Persecution prolonged
Remember, thou Christian martyr, it is enough if thou art found worthy to unloose the sandals of thy Master’s feet! To suppose that persecution for righteousness’ sake belongs to the past, and that Christianity to-day is at peace with the world because it is honored by sects and societies, is to mistake the very nature of religion. Error repeats itself. The trials encountered by prophet, disciple, and apostle, “of whom the world was not worthy,” await, in some form, every pioneer of truth.
Christian warfare
There is too much animal courage in society and not sufficient moral courage. Christians must take up arms against error at home and abroad. They must grapple with sin in themselves and in others, and continue this warfare until they have finished their course. If they keep the faith, they will have the crown of rejoicing.
Christian experience teaches faith in the right and disbelief in the wrong. It bids us work the more earnestly in times of persecution, because then our labor is more needed. Great is the reward of self-sacrifice, though we may never receive it in this world.
The Fatherhood of God
There is a tradition that Publius Lentulus wrote to the authorities at Rome: “The disciples of Jesus believe him the Son of God.” Those instructed in Christian Science have reached the glorious perception that God is the only author of man. The Virgin-mother conceived this idea of God, and gave to her ideal the name of Jesus–that is, Joshua, or Saviour.
Spiritual conception
The illumination of Mary’s spiritual sense put to silence material law and its order of generation, and brought forth her child by the revelation of Truth, demonstrating God as the Father of men. The Holy Ghost, or divine Spirit, overshadowed the pure sense of the Virgin-mother with the full recognition that being is Spirit. The Christ dwelt forever an idea in the bosom of God, the divine Principle of the man Jesus, and woman perceived this spiritual idea, though at first faintly developed.
Man as the offspring of God, as the idea of Spirit, is the immortal evidence that Spirit is harmonious and man eternal. Jesus was the offspring of Mary’s self conscious communion with God. Hence he could give a more spiritual idea of life than other men, and could demonstrate the Science of Love–his Father or divine Principle.
Jesus the way-shower
Born of a woman, Jesus’ advent in the flesh partook partly of Mary’s earthly condition, although he was endowed with the Christ, the divine Spirit, without measure. This accounts for his struggles in Gethsemane and on Calvary, and this enabled him to be the mediator, or way-shower, between God and men. Had his origin and birth been wholly apart from mortal usage, Jesus would not have been appreciable to mortal mind as “the way.”
Rabbi and priest taught the Mosaic law, which said: “An eye for an eye,” and “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” Not so did Jesus, the new executor for God, present the divine law of Love, which blesses even those that curse it.
Rebukes helpful
As the individual ideal of Truth, Christ Jesus came to rebuke rabbinical error and all sin, sickness, and death,-to point out the way of Truth and Life. This ideal was demonstrated throughout the whole earthly career of Jesus, showing the difference between the offspring of Soul and of material sense, of Truth and of error.
If we have triumphed sufficiently over the errors of material sense to allow Soul to hold the control, we shall loathe sin and rebuke it under every mask. Only in this way can we bless our enemies, though they may not so construe our words. We cannot choose for ourselves, but must work out our salvation in the way Jesus taught. In meekness and might, he was found preaching the gospel to the poor. Pride and fear are unfit to bear the standard of Truth, and God will never place it in such hands.
Fleshly ties temporal
Jesus acknowledged no ties of the flesh. He said: “Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.” Again he asked: “Who is my mother, and who are my brethren,” implying that it is they who do the will of his Father. We have no record of his calling any man by the name of father. He recognized Spirit, God, as the only creator, and therefore as the Father of all.
Healing primary
First in the list of Christian duties, he taught his followers the healing power of Truth and Love. He attached no importance to dead ceremonies. It is the living Christ, the practical Truth, which makes Jesus “the resurrection and the life” to all who follow him in deed. Obeying his precious precepts,–following his demonstration so far as we apprehend it,–we drink of his cup, partake of his bread, are baptized with his purity ; and at last we shall rest, sit down with him, in a full understanding of the divine Principle which triumphs over death. For what says Paul? “As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord’s death till he come.”
Painful prospect
Referring to the materiality of the age, Jesus said: “The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” Again, foreseeing the perse- cution which would attend the Science of Spirit, Jesus said: “They shall put you out of the synagogues; yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service; and these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father nor me.”
Sacred sacrament
In ancient Rome a soldier was required to swear allegiance to his general. The Latin word for this oath was sacramentum, and our English word sacrament is derived from it. Among the Jews it was an ancient custom for the master of a feast to pass each guest a cup of wine. But the Eucharist does not commemorate a Roman soldier’s oath, nor was the wine, used on convivial occasions and in Jewish rites, the cup of our Lord. The cup shows forth his bitter experience,–the cup which he prayed might pass from him, though he bowed in holy submission to the divine decree.
“As they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them saying, Drink ye all of it.”
Spiritual refreshment
The true sense is spiritually lost, if the sacrament is confined to the use of bread and wine. The disciples had eaten, yet Jesus prayed and gave them bread. This would have been foolish in a literal sense; but in its spiritual signification, it was natural and beautiful. Jesus prayed; he withdrew from the material senses to refresh his heart with brighter, with spiritual views.
Jesus’ sad repast
The Passover, which Jesus ate with his disciples in the month Nisan on the night before his crucifixion, was a mournful occasion, a sad supper taken at the close of day, in the twilight of a glorious career with shadows fast falling around; and this supper closed forever Jesus’ ritualism or concessions to matter.
Heavenly supplies
His followers, sorrowful and silent, anticipating the hour of their Master’s betrayal, partook of the heavenly manna, which of old had fed in the wilderness the persecuted followers of Truth. Their bread indeed came down from heaven. It was the great truth of spiritual being, healing the sick and casting out error. Their Master had explained it all before, and now this bread was feeding and sustaining them. They had borne this bread from house to house, breaking (explaining) it to others, and now it comforted themselves. For this truth of spiritual being, their Master was about to suffer violence and drain to the dregs his cup of sorrow. He must leave them. With the great glory of an everlasting victory overshadowing him, he gave thanks and said, “Drink ye all of it.”
The holy struggle
When the human element in him struggled with the divine, our great Teacher said: “Not my will, but Thine, be done!”- that is, Let not the flesh, but the Spirit, be represented in me. This is the new understanding of spiritual Love. It gives all for Christ, or Truth. It blesses its enemies, heals the sick, casts out error, raises the dead from trespasses and sins, and preaches the gospel to the poor, the meek in heart.
Incisive questions
Christians, are you drinking his cup? Have you shared the blood of the New Covenant, the persecutions which attend a new and higher understanding of God? If not, can you then say that you have commemorated Jesus in his cup? Are all who eat bread and drink wine in memory of Jesus willing truly to drink his cup, take his cross, and leave all for the Christ-principle? Then why ascribe this inspiration to a dead rite, instead of showing, by casting out error and making the body “holy, acceptable unto God,” that Truth has come to the understanding? If Christ, Truth, has come to us in demonstration, no other commemoration is requisite, for demonstration is Immanuel, or God with us; and if a friend be with us, why need we memorials of that friend?
Millennial glory
If all who ever partook of the sacrament had really commemorated the sufferings of Jesus and drunk of his cup, they would have revolutionized the world. If all who seek his commemoration through material symbols will take up the cross, heal the sick, cast out evils, and preach Christ, or Truth, to the poor,–the receptive thought,–they will bring in the millennium.
Fellowship with Christ
Through all the disciples experienced, they became more spiritual and understood better what the Master had taught. His resurrection was also their resurrection. It helped them to raise themselves and others from spiritual dulness and blind belief in God into the perception of infinite possibilities. They needed this quickening, for soon their dear Master would rise again in the spiritual realm of reality, and ascend far above their apprehension. As the reward for his faithfulness, he would disappear to material sense in that change which has since been called the ascension.
The last breakfast
What a contrast between our Lord’s last supper and his last spiritual breakfast with his disciples in the bright morning hours at the joyful meeting on the shore of the Galilean Sea! His gloom had passed into glory, and His disciples’ grief into repentance,–hearts chastened and pride rebuked. Convinced of the fruitlessness of their toil in the dark and wakened by their Master’s voice, they changed their methods, turned away from material things, and cast their net on the right side. Discerning Christ, Truth, anew on the shore of time, they were enabled to rise somewhat from mortal sensuousness, or the burial of mind in matter, into newness of life as Spirit.
This spiritual meeting with our Lord in the dawn of a new light is the morning meal which Christian Scientists commemorate. They bow before Christ, Truth, to receive more of his reappearing and silently to commune with the divine Principle, Love. They celebrate their Lord’s victory over death, his probation in the flesh after death, its exemplification of human probation, and his spiritual and final ascension above matter, or the flesh, when he rose out of material sight.
Spiritual Eucharist
Our baptism is a purification from all error. Our church is built on the divine Principle, Love. We can unite with this church only as we are newborn of Spirit, as we reach the Life which is Truth and the Truth which is Life by bringing forth the fruits of Love,–casting out error and healing the sick. Our Eucharist is spiritual communion with the one God. Our bread, “which cometh down from heaven,” is Truth. Our cup is the cross. Our wine the inspiration of Love, the draught our Master drank and commended to his followers.
Final purpose
The design of Love is to reform the sinner. If the sinner’s punishment here has been insufficient to reform him, the good man’s heaven would be a hell to the sinner. They, who know not purity and affection by experience, can never find bliss in the blessed company of Truth and Love simply through translation into another sphere. Divine Science reveals the necessity of sufficient suffering, either before or after death, to quench the love of sin. To remit the penalty due for sin, would be for Truth to pardon error. Escape from punishment is not in accordance with God’s government, since justice is the handmaid of mercy.
Jesus endured the shame, that he might pour his dear-bought bounty into barren lives. What was his earthly reward? He was forsaken by all save John, the beloved disciple, and a few women who bowed in silent woe beneath the shadow of his cross. The earthly price of spirituality in a material age and the great moral distance between Christianity and sensualism preclude Christian Science from finding favor with the worldlyminded.
Righteous retribution
A selfish and limited mind may be unjust, but the unlimited and divine Mind is the immortal law of justice as well as of mercy. It is quite as impossible for sinners to receive their full punishment this side of the grave as for this world to bestow on the righteous their full reward. It is useless to suppose that the wicked can gloat over their offences to the last moment and then be suddenly pardoned and pushed into heaven, or that the hand of Love is satisfied with giving us only toil, sacrifice, cross-bearing, multiplied trials, and mockery of our motives in return for our efforts at well doing.
Vicarious suffering
Religious history repeats itself in the suffering of the just for the unjust. Can God therefore overlook the law of righteousness which destroys the belief called sin? Does not Science show that sin brings suffering as much to-day as yesterday? They who sin must suffer. “With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”
Martyrs inevitable
History is full of records of suffering. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Mortals try in vain to slay Truth with the steel or the stake, but error falls only before the sword of Spirit. Martyrs are the human links which connect one stage with another in the history of religion. They are earth’s luminaries, which serve to cleanse and rarefy the atmosphere of material sense and to permeate humanity with purer ideals. Consciousness of right-doing brings its own reward; but not amid the smoke of battle is merit seen and appreciated by lookers-on.
Complete emulation
When will Jesus’ professed followers learn to emulate him in all his ways and to imitate his mighty works? Those who procured the martyrdom of that righteous man would gladly have turned his sacred career into a mutilated doctrinal platform. May the Christians of to-day take up the more practical import of that career! It is possible,–yea, it is the duty and privilege of every child, man, and woman, –to follow in some degree the example of the Master by the demonstration of Truth and Life, of health and holiness. Christians claim to be his followers, but do they follow him in the way that he commanded? Hear these imperative commands: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect!” “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature!” “Heal the sick!”
Jesus’ teaching belittled
Why has this Christian demand so little inspiration to stir mankind to Christian effort? Because men are assured that this command was intended only for a particular period and for a select number of followers. This teaching is even more pernicious than the old doctrine of foreordination,–the election of a few to be saved, while the rest are damned; and so it will be considered, when the lethargy of mortals, produced by man-made doctrines, is broken by the demands of divine Science.
Jesus said: “These signs shall follow them that believe; . . . they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” Who believes him? He was addressing his disciples, yet he did not say, ” These signs shall follow you,” but them–“them that believe” in all time to come. Here the word hands is used metaphorically, as in the text, “The right hand of the Lord is exalted.” It expresses spiritual power; otherwise the healing could not have been done spiritually. At another time Jesus prayed, not for the twelve only, but for as many as should believe “through their word.”
Material pleasures
Jesus experienced few of the pleasures of the physical senses, but his sufferings were the fruits of other people’s sins, not of his own. The eternal Christ, his spiritual selfhood, never suffered. Jesus mapped out the path for others. He unveiled the Christ, the spiritual idea of divine Love. To those buried in the belief of sin and self, living only for pleasure or the gratification of the senses, he said in substance: Having eyes ye see not, and having ears ye hear not; lest ye should understand and be converted, and I might heal you. He taught that the material senses shut out Truth and its healing power.
Mockery of truth
Meekly our Master met the mockery of his unrecognized grandeur. Such indignities as he received, his followers will endure until Christianity’s last triumph. He won eternal honors. He overcame the world, the flesh, and all error, thus proving their nothingness. He wrought a full salvation from sin, sickness, and death. We need “Christ, and him crucified.” We must have trials and self-denials, as well as joys and victories, until all error is destroyed.
A belief suicidal
The educated belief that Soul is in the body causes mortals to regard death as a friend, as a stepping-stone out of mortality into immortality and bliss. The Bible calls death an enemy, and Jesus overcame death and the grave instead of yielding to them. He was “the way.” To him, therefore, death was not the threshold over which he must pass into living glory.
Present salvation
“Now,” cried the apostle, “is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation,”–meaning, not that now men must prepare for a future-world salvation, or safety, but that now is the time in which to experience that salvation in spirit and in life. Now is the time for so-called material pains and material pleasures to pass away, for both are unreal, because impossible in Science. To break this earthly spell, mortals must get the true idea and divine Principle of all that really exists and governs the universe harmoniously. This thought is apprehended slowly, and the interval before its attainment is attended with doubts and defeats as well as triumphs.
Sin and penalty
Who will stop the practice of sin so long as he believes in the pleasures of sin? When mortals once admit that evil confers no pleasure, they turn from it. Remove error from thought, and it will not appear in effect. The advanced thinker and devout Christian, perceiving the scope and tendency of Christian healing and its Science, will support them. Another will say: “Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season I will call for thee.”
Divine Science adjusts the balance as Jesus adjusted it. Science removes the penalty only by first removing the sin which incurs the penalty. This is my sense of divine pardon, which I understand to mean God’s method of destroying sin. If the saying is true, “While there’s life there’s hope,” its opposite is also true, While there’s sin there’s doom. Another’s suffering cannot lessen our own liability. Did the martyrdom of Savonarola make the crimes of his implacable enemies less criminal?
Suffering inevitable
Was it just for Jesus to suffer? No; but it was inevitable, for not otherwise could he show us the way and the power of Truth. If a career so great and good as that of Jesus could not avert a felon’s fate, lesser apostles of Truth may endure human brutality without murmuring, rejoicing to enter into fellowship with him through the triumphal arch of Truth and Love.
Service and worship
Our heavenly Father, divine Love, demands that all men should follow the example of our Master and his apostles and not merely worship his personality. It is sad that the phrase divine service has come so generally to mean public worship instead of daily deeds.
Within the veil
The nature of Christianity is peaceful and blessed, but in order to enter into the kingdom, the anchor of hope must be cast beyond the veil of matter into the Shekinah into which Jesus has passed before us; and this advance beyond matter must come through the joys and triumphs of the righteous as well as through their sorrows and afflictions. Like our Master, we must depart from material sense into the spiritual sense of being.
The thorns and flowers
The God-inspired walk calmly on though it be with bleeding footprints, and in the hereafter they will reap what they now sow. The pampered hypocrite may have a flowery pathway here, but he cannot forever break the Golden Rule and escape the penalty due.
Healing early lost
The proofs of Truth, Life, and Love, which Jesus gave by casting out error and healing the sick, completed his earthly mission; but in the Christian Church this demonstration of healing was early lost, about three centuries after the crucifixion. No ancient school of philosophy, materia medica, or scholastic theology ever taught or demonstrated the divine healing of absolute Science.
Immortal achieval
Jesus foresaw the reception Christian Science would have before it was understood, but this foreknowledge hindered him not. He fulfilled his God-mission, and then sat down at the right hand of the Father. Persecuted from city to city, his apostles still went about doing good deeds, for which they were maligned and stoned. The truth taught by Jesus, the elders scoffed at. Why? Because it demanded more than they were willing to practise. It was enough for them to believe in a national Deity; but that belief, from their time to ours, has never made a disciple who could cast out evils and heal the sick.
Jesus’ life proved, divinely and scientifically, that God is Love, whereas priest and rabbi affirmed God to be a mighty potentate, who loves and hates. The Jewish theology gave no hint of the unchanging love of God.
A belief in death
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, which comes in darkness and disappears with the light.
Cruel desertion
The “man of sorrows” was in no peril from salary or popularity. Though entitled to the homage of the world and endorsed pre-eminently by the approval of God, his brief triumphal entry into Jerusalem was followed by the desertion of all save a few friends, who sadly followed him to the foot of the cross.
Death outdone
The resurrection of the great demonstrator of God’s power was the proof of his final triumph over body and matter, and gave full evidence of divine Science,–evidence so important to mortals. The belief that man has existence or mind separate from God is a dying error. This error Jesus met with divine Science and proved its nothingness. Because of the wondrous glory which God bestowed on His anointed, temptation, sin, sickness, and death had no terror for Jesus. Let men think they had killed the body! Afterwards he would show it to them unchanged. This demonstrates that in Christian Science the true man is governed by God–by good, not evil–and is therefore not a mortal but an immortal. Jesus had taught his disciples the Science of this proof. He was here to enable them to test his still uncomprehended saying, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also.” They must understand more fully his Life-principle by casting out error, healing the sick, and raising the dead, even as they did understand it after his bodily departure.
Pentecost repeated
The magnitude of Jesus’ work, his material disappearance before their eyes and his reappearance, all enabled the disciples to understand what Jesus had said. Heretofore they had only believed; now they understood. The advent of this understanding is what is meant by the descent of the Holy Ghost,–that influx of divine Science which so illuminated the Pentecostal Day and is now repeating its ancient history.
Convincing evidence
Jesus’ last proof was the highest, the most convincing, the most profitable to his students. The malignity of brutal persecutors, the treason and suicide of his betrayer, were overruled by divine Love to the glorification of the man and of the true idea of God, which Jesus’ persecutors had mocked and tried to slay. The final demonstration of the truth which Jesus taught, and for which he was crucified, opened a new era for the world. Those who slew him to stay his influence perpetuated and extended it.
Divine victory
Jesus rose higher in demonstration because of the cup of bitterness he drank. Human law had condemned him, but he was demonstrating divine Science. Out of reach of the barbarity of his enemies, he was acting under spiritual law in defiance of matter and mortality, and that spiritual law sustained him. The divine must overcome the human at every point. The Science Jesus taught and lived must triumph over all material beliefs about life, substance, and intelligence, and the multitudinous errors growing from such beliefs.
Love must triumph over hate. Truth and Life must seal the victory over error and death, before the thorns can be laid aside for a crown, the benediction follow, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” and the supremacy of Spirit be demonstrated.
Jesus in the tomb
The lonely precincts of the tomb gave Jesus a refuge from his foes, a place in which to solve the great problem of being. His three days’ work in the sepulchre set the seal of eternity on time. He proved Life to be deathless and Love to be the master of hate. He met and mastered on the basis of Christian Science, the power of Mind over matter, all the claims of medicine, surgery, and hygiene.
He took no drugs to allay inflammation. He did not depend upon food or pure air to resuscitate wasted energies. He did not require the skill of a surgeon to heal the torn palms and bind up the wounded side and lacerated feet, that he might use those hands to remove the napkin and winding-sheet, and that he might employ his feet as before.
The deific naturalism
Could it be called supernatural for the God of nature to sustain Jesus in his proof of man’s truly derived power? It was a method of surgery beyond material art, but it was not a supernatural act. On the contrary, it was a divinely natural act, whereby divinity brought to humanity the understanding of the Christhealing and revealed a method infinitely above that of human invention.
Obstacles overcome
His disciples believed Jesus to be dead while he was hidden in the sepulchre, whereas he was alive, demonstrating within the narrow tomb the power of Spirit to overrule mortal, material sense. There were rock-ribbed walls in the way, and a great stone must be rolled from the cave’s mouth; but Jesus vanquished every material obstacle, overcame every law of matter, and stepped forth from his gloomy resting-place, crowned with the glory of a sublime success, an everlasting victory.
Victory over the grave
Our Master fully and finally demonstrated divine Science in his victory over death and the grave. Jesus’ deed was for the enlightenment of men and for the salvation of the whole world from sin, sickness, and death. Paul writes: “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the [seeming] death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.” Three days after his bodily burial he talked with his disciples. The persecutors had failed to hide immortal Truth and Love in a sepulchre.
The stone rolled away
Glory be to God, and peace to the struggling hearts! Christ hath rolled away the stone from the door of human hope and faith, and through the revelation and demonstration of life in God, hath elevated them to possible at-one-ment with the spiritual idea of man and his divine Principle, Love.
After the resurrection
They who earliest saw Jesus after the resurrection and beheld the final proof of all that he had taught, misconstrued that event. Even his disciples at first called him a spirit, ghost, or spectre, for they believed his body to be dead. His reply was: “Spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” The reappearing of Jesus was not the return of a spirit. He presented the same body that he had before his crucifixion, and so glorified the supremacy of Mind over matter.
Jesus’ students, not sufficiently advanced fully to understand their Master’s triumph, did not perform many wonderful works, until they saw him after his crucifixion and learned that he had not died. This convinced them of the truthfulness of all that he had taught.
Spiritual interpretation
In the walk to Emmaus, Jesus was known to his friends by the words, which made their hearts burn within them, and by the breaking of bread. The divine Spirit, which identified Jesus thus centuries ago, has spoken through the inspired Word and will speak through it in every age and clime. It is revealed to the receptive heart, and is again seen casting out evil and healing the sick.
Corporeality and Spirit
The Master said plainly that physique was not Spirit, and after his resurrection he proved to the physical senses that his body was not changed until he himself ascended,–or, in other words, rose even higher in the understanding of Spirit, God. To convince Thomas of this, Jesus caused him to examine the nailprints and the spear-wound.
Spiritual ascension
Jesus’ unchanged physical condition after what seemed to be death was followed by his exaltation above all material conditions; and this exaltation explained his ascension, and revealed unmistakably a probationary and progressive state beyond the grave. Jesus was “the way;” that is, he marked the way for all men. In his final demonstration, called the ascension, which closed the earthly record of Jesus, he rose above the physical knowledge of his disciples, and the material senses saw him no more.
Pentecostal power
His students then received the Holy Ghost. By this is meant, that by all they had witnessed and suffered, they were roused to an enlarged understanding of divine Science, even to the spiritual interpretation and discernment of Jesus’ teachings and demonstrations, which gave them a faint conception of the Life which is God. They no longer measured man by material sense. After gaining the true idea of their glorified Master, they became better healers, leaning no longer on matter, but on the divine Principle of their work. The influx of light was sudden. It was sometimes an overwhelming power as on the Day of Pentecost.
The traitor’s conspiracy
Judas conspired against Jesus. The world’s ingratitude and hatred towards that just man effected his betrayal. The traitor’s price was thirty pieces of silver and the smiles of the Pharisees. He chose his time, when the people were in doubt concerning Jesus’ teachings.
A period was approaching which would reveal the infinite distance between Judas and his Master. Judas Iscariot knew this. He knew that the great goodness of that Master placed a gulf between Jesus and his betrayer, and this spiritual distance inflamed Judas’ envy. The greed for gold strengthened his ingratitude, and for a time quieted his remorse. He knew that the world generally loves a lie better than Truth; and so he plotted the betrayal of Jesus in order to raise himself in popular estimation. His dark plot fell to the ground, and the traitor fell with it.
The disciples’ desertion of their Master in his last earthly struggle was punished; each one came to a violent death except St. John, of whose death we have no record.
Gethsemane glorified
During his night of gloom and glory in the garden, Jesus realized the utter error of a belief in any possible material intelligence. The pangs of neglect and the staves of bigoted ignorance smote him sorely. His students slept. He said unto them: “Could Ye not watch with me one hour?” Could they not watch with him who, waiting and struggling in voiceless agony, held uncomplaining guard over a world? There was no response to that human yearning, and so Jesus turned forever away from earth to heaven, from sense to Soul.
Remembering the sweat of agony which fell in holy benediction on the grass of Gethsemane, shall the humblest or mightiest disciple murmur when he drinks from the same cup, and think, or even wish, to escape the exalting ordeal of sin’s revenge on its destroyer? Truth and Love bestow few palms until the consummation of a life-work.
Defensive weapons
Judas had the world’s weapons. Jesus had not one of them, and chose not the world’s means of defence. “He opened not his mouth.” The great demonstrator of Truth and Love was silent before envy and hate. Peter would have smitten the enemies of his Master, but Jesus forbade him, thus rebuking resentment or animal courage. He said: “Put up thy sword.”
Pilate’s question
Pale in the presence of his own momentous question, “What is Truth,” Pilate was drawn into acquiescence with the demands of Jesus’ enemies. Pilate was ignorant of the consequences of his awful decision against human rights and divine Love, knowing not that he was hastening the final demonstration of what life is and of what the true knowledge of God can do for man.
The women at the cross could have answered Pilate’s question. They knew what had inspired their devotion, winged their faith, opened the eyes of their understanding, healed the sick, cast out evil, and caused the disciples to say to their Master: “Even the devils are subject unto us through thy name.”
Students’ ingratitude
Where were the seventy whom Jesus sent forth? Were all conspirators save eleven? Had they forgotten the great exponent of God? Had they so soon lost sight of his mighty works, his toils, privations, sacrifices, his divine patience, sublime courage, and unrequited affection? O, why did they not gratify his last human yearning with one sign of fidelity?
Heaven’s sentinel
The meek demonstrator of good, the highest instructor and friend of man, met his earthly fate alone with God. No human eye was there to pity, no arm to save. Forsaken by all whom he had blessed, this faithful sentinel of God at the highest post of power, charged with the grandest trust of heaven, was ready to be transformed by the renewing of the infinite Spirit. He was to prove that the Christ is not subject to material conditions, but is above the reach of human wrath, and is able, through Truth, Life, and Love, to triumph over sin, sickness, death, and the grave.
Cruel contumely
The priests and rabbis, before whom he had meekly walked, and those to whom he had given the highest proofs of divine power, mocked him on the cross, saying derisively, “He saved others; himself he cannot save.” These scoffers, who turned “aside the right of a man before the face of the Most High,” esteemed Jesus as “stricken, smitten of God.”
“He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” “Who shall declare his generation?” Who shall decide what truth and love are?
A cry of despair
The last supreme moment of mockery, desertion, torture, added to an overwhelming sense of the magnitude of his work, wrung from Jesus’ lips the awful cry, “My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” This despairing appeal, if made to a human parent, would impugn the justice and love of a father who could withhold a clear token of his presence to sustain and bless so faithful a son. The appeal of Jesus was made both to his divine Principle, the God who is Love, and to himself, Love’s pure idea. Had Life, Truth, and Love forsaken him in his highest demonstration? This was a startling question. No! They must abide in him and he in them, or that hour would be shorn of its mighty blessing for the human race.
Divine Science misunderstood
If his full recognition of eternal Life had for a moment given way before the evidence of the bodily senses, what would his accusers have said? Even what they did say,–that Jesus’ teachings were false, and that all evidence of their correctness was destroyed by his death. But this saying could not make it so.
The real pillory
The burden of that hour was terrible beyond human conception. The distrust of mortal minds, disbelieving the purpose of his mission, was a million times sharper than the thorns which pierced his flesh. The real cross, which Jesus bore up the hill of grief, was the world’s hatred of Truth and Love. Not the spear nor the material cross wrung from his faithful lips the plaintive cry, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” It was the possible loss of something more important than human life which moved him, – the possible misapprehension of the sublimest influence of his career. This dread added the drop of gall to his cup.
Life-power indestructible
Jesus could have withdrawn himself from his enemies. He had power to lay down a human sense of life for his spiritual identity in the likeness of the divine; but he allowed men to attempt the destruction of the mortal body in order that he might furnish the proof of immortal life. Nothing could kill this Life of man. Jesus could give his temporal life into his enemies’ hands; but when his earth-mission was accomplished, his spiritual life, indestructible and eternal, was found forever the same. He knew that matter had no life and that real Life is God; therefore he could no more be separated from his spiritual Life than God could be extinguished.
Example for our salvation
His consummate example was for the salvation of us all, but only through doing the works which he did and taught others to do. His purpose in healing was not alone to restore health, but to demonstrate his divine Principle. He was inspired by God, by Truth and Love, in all that he said and did. The motives of his persecutors were pride, envy, cruelty, and vengeance, inflicted on the physical Jesus, but aimed at the divine Principle, Love, which rebuked their sensuality.
Jesus was unselfish. His spirituality separated him from sensuousness, and caused the selfish materialist to hate him; but it was this spirituality which enabled Jesus to heal the sick, cast out evil, and raise the dead.
Master’s business
From early boyhood he was about his “Father’s business.” His pursuits lay far apart from theirs. His master was Spirit; their master was matter. He served God; they served mammon. His affections were pure; theirs were carnal. His senses drank in the spiritual evidence of health, holiness, and life; their senses testified oppositely, and absorbed the material evidence of sin, sickness, and death.
Purity’s rebuke
Their imperfections and impurity felt the ever-present rebuke of his perfection and purity. Hence the world’s hatred of the just and perfect Jesus, and the prophet’s foresight of the reception error would give him. “Despised and rejected of men,” was Isaiah’s graphic word concerning the coming Prince of Peace. Herod and Pilate laid aside old feuds in order to unite in putting to shame and death the best man that ever trod the globe. To-day, as of old, error and evil again make common cause against the exponents of truth.
Saviour’s prediction
The “man of sorrows” best understood the nothingness of material life and intelligence and the mighty actuality of all-inclusive God, good. These were the two cardinal points of Mind-healing, or Christian Science, which armed him with Love. The highest earthly representative of God, speaking of human ability to reflect divine power, prophetically said to his disciples, speaking not for their day only but for all time: “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also;” and “These signs shall follow them that believe.”
Defamitory accusations
The accusations of the Pharisees were as self-contradictory as their religion. The bigot, the debauchee, the hypocrite, called Jesus a glutton and a wine-bibber. They said: “He casteth out devils through Beelzebub,” and is the “friend of publicans and sinners.” The latter accusation was true, but not in their meaning. Jesus was no ascetic. He did not fast as did the Baptist’s disciples; yet there never lived a man so far removed from appetites and passions as the Nazarene. He rebuked sinners pointedly and unflinchingly, because he was their friend; hence the cup he drank.
Reputation and character
The reputation of Jesus was the very opposite of his character. Why? Because the divine Principle and practice of Jesus were misunderstood. He was at work in divine Science. His words and works were unknown to the world because above and contrary to the world’s religious sense. Mortals believed in God as humanly mighty, rather than as divine, infinite Love.
Inspiring discontent
The world could not interpret aright the discomfort which Jesus inspired and the spiritual blessings which might flow from such discomfort. Science shows the cause of the shock so often produced by the truth,–namely, that this shock arises from the great distance between the individual and Truth. Like Peter, we should weep over the warning, instead of denying the truth or mocking the lifelong sacrifice which goodness makes for the destruction of evil.
Bearing our sins
Jesus bore our sins in his body. He knew the mortal errors which constitute the material body, and could destroy those errors; but at the time when Jesus felt our infirmities, he had not conquered all the beliefs of the flesh or his sense of material life, nor had he risen to his final demonstration of spiritual power.
Had he shared the sinful beliefs of others, he would have been less sensitive to those beliefs. Through the magnitude of his human life, he demonstrated the divine Life. Out of the amplitude of his pure affection, he defined Love. With the affluence of Truth, he vanquished error. The world acknowledged not his righteousness, seeing it not; but earth received the harmony his glorified example introduced.
Inspiration of sacrifice
Who is ready to follow his teaching and example? All must sooner or later plant themselves in Christ, the true idea of God. That he might liberally pour his dear-bought treasures into empty or sinfilled human storehouses, was the inspiration of Jesus’ intense human sacrifice. In witness of his divine commission, he presented the proof that Life, Truth, and Love heal the sick and the sinning, and triumph over death through Mind, not matter. This was the highest proof he could have offered of divine Love. His hearers understood neither his words nor his works. They would not accept his meek interpretation of life nor follow his example.
Spiritual friendship
His earthly cup of bitterness was drained to the dregs. There adhered to him only a few unpretentious friends, whose religion was something more than a name. It was so vital, that it enabled them to understand the Nazarene and to share the glory of eternal life. He said that those who followed him should drink of his cup, and history has confirmed the prediction.
Injustice to the Saviour
If that Godlike and glorified man were physically on earth to-day, would not some, who now profess to love him, reject him? Would they not deny him even the rights of humanity, if he enter tained any other sense of being and religion than theirs? The advancing century, from a deadened sense of the invisible God, to-day subjects to unchristian comment and usage the idea of Christian healing enjoined by Jesus; but this does not affect the invincible facts.
Perhaps the early Christian era did Jesus no more injustice than the later centuries have bestowed upon the healing Christ and spiritual idea of being. Now that the gospel of healing is again preached by the wayside, does not the pulpit sometimes scorn it? But that curative mission, which presents the Saviour in a clearer light than mere words can possibly do, cannot be left out of Christianity, although it is again ruled out of the synagogue.
Truth’s immortal idea is sweeping down the centuries, gathering beneath its wings the sick and sinning. My weary hope tries to realize that happy day, when man shall recognize the Science of Christ and love his neighbor as himself,–when he shall realize God’s omnipotence and the healing power of the divine Love in what it has done and is doing for mankind. The promises will be fulfilled. The time for the reappearing of the divine healing is throughout all time; and whosoever layeth his earthly all on the altar of divine Science, drinketh of Christ’s cup now, and is endued with the spirit and power of Christian healing.
In the words of St. John: “He shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever.” This Comforter I understand to be Divine Science.
Chapter III – Marriage
What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.–JESUS.
WHEN our great Teacher came to him for baptism, John was astounded. Reading his thoughts, Jesus added: “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” Jesus’ concessions (in certain cases) to material methods were for the advancement of spiritual good.
Marriage temporal
Marriage is the legal and moral provision for generation among human kind. Until the spiritual creation is discerned intact, is apprehended and understood, and His kingdom is come as in the vision of the Apocalypse, – where the corporeal sense of creation was cast out, and its spiritual sense was revealed from heaven,–marriage will continue, subject to such moral regulations as will secure increasing virtue.
Fidelity required
Infidelity to the marriage covenant is the social scourge of all races, “the pestilence that walketh in darkness, . . . the destruction that wasteth at noonday.” The commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” is no less imperative than the one, “Thou shalt not kill.”
Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.
Mental elements
Union of the masculine and feminine qualities constitutes completeness. The masculine mind reaches a higher tone through certain elements of the feminine, while the feminine mind gains courage and strength through masculine qualities. These different elements conjoin naturally with each other, and their true harmony is in spiritual oneness. Both sexes should be loving, pure, tender, and strong. The attraction between native qualities will be perpetual only as it is pure and true, bringing sweet seasons of renewal like the returning spring.
Affection’s demands
Beauty, wealth, or fame is incompetent to meet the demands of the affections, and should never weigh against the better claims of intellect, goodness, and virtue. Happiness is spiritual, born of Truth and Love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.
Help and discipline
Human affection is not poured forth vainly, even though it meet no return. Love enriches the nature, enlarging, purifying, and elevating it. The wintry blasts of earth may uproot the flowers of affection, and scatter them to the winds; but this severance of fleshly ties serves to unite thought more closely to God, for Love supports the struggling heart until it ceases to sigh over the world and begins to unfold its wings for heaven.
Marriage is unblest or blest, according to the disappointments it involves or the hopes it fulfils. To happify existence by constant intercourse with those adapted to elevate it, should be the motive of society. Unity of spirit gives new pinions to joy, or else joy’s drooping wings trail in dust.
Chord and discord
Ill-arranged notes produce discord. Tones of the human mind may be different, but they should be concordant in order to blend properly. Unselfish ambition, noble life-motives, and purity, these constituents of thought, mingling, constitute individually and collectively true happiness, strength, and permanence.
Mutual freedom
There is moral freedom in Soul. Never contract the horizon of a worthy outlook by the selfish exaction of all another’s time and thoughts. With additional joys, benevolence should grow more diffusive. The narrowness and jealousy, which would confine a wife or a husband forever within four walls, will not promote the sweet interchange of confidence and love; but on the other hand, a wandering desire for incessant amusement outside the home circle is a poor augury for the happiness of wedlock. Home is the dearest spot on earth, and it should be the centre, though not the boundary, of the affections.
A useful suggestion
Said the peasant bride to her lover: “Two eat no more together than they eat separately.” This is a hint that a wife ought not to court vulgar extravagance or stupid ease, because another supplies her wants. Wealth may obviate the necessity for toil or the chance for ill-nature in the marriage relation, but nothing can abolish the cares of marriage.
Differing duties
“She that is married careth . . . how she may please her husband,” says the Bible; and this is the pleasantest thing to do. Matrimony should never be entered into without a full recognition of its enduring obligations on both sides. There should be the most tender solicitude for each other’s happiness, and mutual attention and approbation should wait on all the years of married life.
Mutual compromises will often maintain a compact which might otherwise become unbearable. Man should not be required to participate in all the annoyances and cares of domestic economy, nor should woman be expected to understand political economy. Fulfilling the different demands of their united spheres, their sympathies should blend in sweet confidence and cheer, each partner sustaining the other,–thus hallowing the union of interests and affections, in which the heart finds peace and home.
Trysting renewed
Tender words and unselfish care in what promotes the welfare and happiness of your wife will prove more salutary in prolonging her health and smiles than stolid indifference or jealousy. Husbands, hear this and remember how slight a word or deed may renew the old trysting-times.
After marriage, it is too late to grumble over incompatibility of disposition. A mutual understanding should exist before this union and continue ever after, for deception is fatal to happiness.
Permanent obligation
The nuptial vow should never be annulled, so long as its moral obligations are kept intact; but the frequency of divorce shows that the sacredness of this relationship is losing its influence, and that fatal mistakes are undermining its foundations. Separation never should take place, and it never would, if both husband and wife were genuine Christian Scientists. Science inevitably lifts one’s being higher in the scale of harmony and happiness.
Permanent affection
Kindred tastes, motives, and aspirations are necessary to the formation of a happy and permanent companionship. The beautiful in character is also the good, welding indissolubly the links of affection. A mother’s affection cannot be weaned from her child, because the mother-love includes purity and constancy, both of which are immortal. Therefore maternal affection lives on under whatever difficulties.
From the logic of events we learn that selfishness and impurity alone are fleeting, and that wisdom will ultimately put asunder what she hath not joined together.
Centre for affections
Marriage should improve the human species, becoming a barrier against vice, a protection to woman, strength to man, and a centre for the affections. This, however, in a majority of cases, is not its present tendency, and why? Because the education of the higher nature is neglected, and other considerations, – passion, frivolous amusements, personal adornment, display, and pride,–occupy thought.
Spiritual concord
An ill-attuned ear calls discord harmony, not appreciating concord. So physical sense, not discerning the true happiness of being, places it on a false basis. Science will correct the discord, and teach us life’s sweeter harmonies.
Soul has infinite resources with which to bless mankind, and happiness would be more readily attained and would be more secure in our keeping, if sought in Soul. Higher enjoyments alone can satisfy the cravings of immortal man. We cannot circumscribe happiness within the limits of personal sense. The senses confer no real enjoyment.
Ascendency of good
The good in human affections must have ascendency over the evil and the spiritual over the animal, or happiness will never be won. The attainment of this celestial condition would improve our progeny, diminish crime, and give higher aims to ambition. Every valley of sin must be exalted, and every mountain of selfishness be brought low, that the highway of our God may be prepared in Science. The offspring of heavenly-minded parents inherit more intellect, better balanced minds, and sounder constitutions.
Propensities inherited
If some fortuitous circumstance places promising children in the arms of gross parents, often these beautiful children early droop and die, like tropical flowers born amid Alpine snows. If perchance they live to become parents in their turn, they may reproduce in their own helpless little ones the grosser traits of their ancestors. What hope of happiness, what noble ambition, can inspire the child who inherits propensities that must either be overcome or reduce him to a loathsome wreck?
Is not the propagation of the human species a greater responsibility, a more solemn charge, than the culture of your garden or the raising of stock to increase your flocks and herds? Nothing unworthy of perpetuity should be transmitted to children.
The formation of mortals must greatly improve to advance mankind. The scientific morale of marriage is spiritual unity. If the propagation of a higher human species is requisite to reach this goal, then its material conditions can only be permitted for the purpose of generating. The foetus must be kept mentally pure and the period of gestation have the sanctity of virginity.
The entire education of children should be such as to form habits of obedience to the moral and spiritual law, with which the child can meet and master the belief in socalled physical laws, a belief which breeds disease.
Inheritance heeded
If parents create in their babes a desire for incessant amusement, to be always fed, rocked, tossed, or talked to, those parents should not, in after years, complain of their children’s fretfulness or frivolity, which the parents themselves have occasioned. Taking less “thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink”; less thought “for your body what ye shall put on,” will do much more for the health of the rising generation than you dream. Children should be allowed to remain children in knowledge, and should become men and women only through growth in the understanding of man’s higher nature.
The Mind creative
We must not attribute more and more intelligence to matter, but less and less, if we would be wise and healthy. The divine Mind, which forms the bud and blossom, will care for the human body, even as it clothes the lily; but let no mortal interfere with God’s government by thrusting in the laws of erring, human concepts.
Superior law of Soul
The higher nature of man is not governed by the lower; if it were, the order of wisdom would be reversed. Our false views of life hide eternal harmony, and produce the ills of which we complain. Because mortals believe in material laws and reject the Science of Mind, this does not make materiality first and the superior law of Soul last. You would never think that flannel was better for warding off pulmonary disease than the controlling Mind, if you understood the Science of being.
Spiritual origin
In Science man is the offspring of Spirit. The beautiful, good, and pure constitute his ancestry. His origin is not, like that of mortals, in brute instinct, nor does he pass through material conditions prior to reaching intelligence. Spirit is his primitive and ultimate source of being; God is his Father, and Life is the law of his being.
The rights of woman
Civil law establishes very unfair differences between the rights of the two sexes. Christian Science furnishes no precedent for such injustice, and civilization mitigates it in some measure. Still, it is a marvel why usage should accord woman less rights than does either Christian Science or civilization.
Unfair discrimination
Our laws are not impartial, to say the least, in their discrimination as to the person, property, and parental claims of the two sexes. If the elective franchise for women will remedy the evil with- out encouraging difficulties of greater magnitude, let us hope it will be granted. A feasible as well as rational means of improvement at present is the elevation of society in general and the achievement of a nobler race for legislation,–a race having higher aims and motives.
If a dissolute husband deserts his wife, certainly the wronged, and perchance impoverished, woman should be allowed to collect her own wages, enter into business agreements, hold real estate, deposit funds, and own her children free from interference.
Want of uniform justice is a crying evil caused by the selfishness and inhumanity of man. Our forefathers exercised their faith in the direction taught by the Apostle James, when he said: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father, is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”
Benevolence hindered
Pride, envy, or jealousy seems on most occasions to be the master of ceremonies, ruling out primitive Christianity. When a man lends a helping hand to some noble woman, struggling alone with adversity, his wife should not say, “It is never well to interfere with your neighbor’s business.” A wife is sometimes debarred by a covetous domestic tyrant from giving the ready aid her sympathy and charity would afford.
Progressive development
Marriage should signify a union of hearts. Furthermore, the time cometh of which Jesus spake, when he declared that in the resurrection there should be no more marrying nor giving in marriage, but man would be as the angels. Then shall Soul rejoice in its own, in which passion has no part. Then white-robed purity will unite in one person masculine wisdom and feminine love, spiritual understanding and perpetual peace.
Until it is learned that God is the Father of all, marriage will continue. Let not mortals permit a disregard of law which might lead to a worse state of society than now exists. Honesty and virtue ensure the stability of the marriage covenant. Spirit will ultimately claim its own,–all that really is,–and the voices of physical sense will be forever hushed.
Blessing of Christ
Experience should be the school of virtue, and human happiness should proceed from man’s highest nature. May Christ, Truth, be present at every bridal altar to turn the water into wine and to give to human life an inspiration by which man’s spiritual and eternal existence may be discerned.
Righteous foundations
If the foundations of human affection are consistent with progress, they will be strong and enduring. Divorces should warn the age of some fundamental error in the marriage state. The union of the sexes suffers fearful discord. To gain Christian Science and its harmony, life should be more metaphysically regarded.
Powerless promises
The broadcast powers of evil so conspicuous to-day show themselves in the materialism and sensualism of the age, struggling against the advancing spiritual era. Beholding the world’s lack of Christianity and the powerlessness of vows to make home happy, the human mind will at length demand a higher affection.
Transition and reform
There will ensue a fermentation over this as over many other reforms, until we get at last the clear straining of truth, and impurity and error are left among the lees. The fermentation even of fluids is not pleasant. An unsettled, transitional stage is never desirable on its own account. Matrimony, which was once a fixed fact among us, must lose its present slippery footing, and man must find permanence and peace in a more spiritual adherence.
The mental chemicalization, which has brought conjugal infidelity to the surface, will assuredly throw off this evil, and marriage will become purer when the scum is gone.
Thou art right, immortal Shakespeare, great poet of humanity:
Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
Salutary sorrow
Trials teach mortals not to lean on a material staff, a broken reed, which pierces the heart. We do not half remember this in the sunshine of joy and prosperity. Sorrow is salutary. Through great tribulation we enter the kingdom. Trials are proofs of God’s care. Spiritual development germinates not from seed sown in the soil of material hopes, but when these decay, Love propagates anew the higher joys of Spirit, which have no taint of earth. Each successive stage of experience unfolds new views of divine goodness and love.
Amidst gratitude for conjugal felicity, it is well to remember how fleeting are human joys. Amidst conjugal infelicity, it is well to hope, pray, and wait patiently on divine wisdom to point out the path.
Patience is wisdom
Husbands and wives should never separate if there is no Christian demand for it. It is better to await the logic of events than for a wife precipitately to leave her husband or for a husband to leave his wife. If one is better than the other, as must always be the case, the other pre-eminently needs good company. Socrates considered patience salutary under such circumstances, making his Xantippe a discipline for his philosophy.
The gold and dross
Sorrow has its reward. It never leaves us where it found us. The furnace separates the gold from the dross that the precious metal may be graven with the image of God. The cup our Father hath given, shall we not drink it and learn the lessons He teaches?
Weathering the storm
When the ocean is stirred by a storm, then the clouds lower, the wind shrieks through the tightened shrouds, and the waves lift themselves into mountains. We ask the helmsman: “Do you know your course? Can you steer safely amid the storm?” He answers bravely, but even the dauntless seaman is not sure of his safety; nautical science is not equal to the Science of Mind. Yet, acting up to his highest understanding, firm at the post of duty, the mariner works on and awaits the issue. Thus should we deport ourselves on the seething ocean of sorrow. Hoping and working, one should stick to the wreck, until an irresistible propulsion precipitates his doom or sunshine gladdens the troubled sea.
Spiritual power
The notion that animal natures can possibly give force to character is too absurd for consideration, when we remember that through spiritual ascendency our Lord and Master healed the sick, raised the dead, and commanded even the winds and waves to obey him. Grace and Truth are potent beyond all other means and methods.
The lack of spiritual power in the limited demonstration of popular Christianity does not put to silence the labor of centuries. Spiritual, not corporeal, consciousness is needed. Man delivered from sin, disease, and death presents the true likeness or spiritual ideal.
Basis of true religion
Systems of religion and medicine treat of physical pains and pleasures, but Jesus rebuked the suffering from any such cause or effect. The epoch approaches when the understanding of the truth of being will be the basis of true religion. At present mortals progress slowly for fear of being thought ridiculous. They are slaves to fashion, pride, and sense. Sometime we shall learn how Spirit, the great architect, has created men and women in Science. We ought to weary of the fleeting and false and to cherish nothing which hinders our highest selfhood.
Jealousy is the grave of affection. The presence of mistrust, where confidence is due, withers the flowers of Eden and scatters love’s petals to decay. Be not in haste to take the vow “until death do us part.” Consider its obligations, its responsibilities, its relations to your growth and to your influence on other lives.
Insanity and agamogenesis
I never knew more than one individual who believed in agamogenesis; she was unmarried, a lovely character, was suffering from incipient insanity, and a Christian Scientist cured her. I have named her case to individuals, when casting my bread upon the waters, and it may have caused the good to ponder and the evil to hatch their silly innuendoes and lies, since salutary causes sometimes incur these effects. The perpetuation of the floral species by bud or cell-division is evident, but I discredit the belief that agamogenesis applies to the human species.
God’s creation intact
Christian Science presents unfoldment, not accretion; it manifests no material growth from molecule to mind, but an impartation of the divine Mind to man and the universe. Proportionately as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal, harmonious being will be spiritually discerned; and man, not of the earth earthly but coexistent with God, will appear. The scientific fact that man and the universe are evolved from Spirit, and so are spiritual, is as fixed in divine Science as is the proof that mortals gain the sense of health only as they lose the sense of sin and disease. Mortals can never understand God’s creation while believing that man is a creator. God’s children already created will be cognized only as man finds the truth of being. Thus it is that the real, ideal man appears in proportion as the false and material disappears. No longer to marry or to be “given in marriage” neither closes man’s continuity nor his sense of increasing number in God’s infinite plan. Spiritually to understand that there is but one creator, God, unfolds all creation, confirms the Scriptures, brings the sweet assurance of no parting, no pain, and of man deathless and perfect and eternal.
If Christian Scientists educate their own offspring spiritually, they can educate others spiritually and not conflict with the scientific sense of God’s creation. Some day the child will ask his parent: “Do you keep the First Commandment? Do you have one God and creator, or is man a creator?” If the father replies, “God creates man through man,” the child may ask, “Do you teach that Spirit creates materially, or do you declare that Spirit is infinite, therefore matter is out of the question?” Jesus said, “The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage.”
Chapter IV – Christian Science Versus Spiritualism
And when they shall say unto you,
Seek unto them that have familiar spirits,
And unto wizards that peep and that mutter;
Should not a people seek unto their God?–ISAIAH.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death. Then said the Jews unto him, Now we know that thou hast a devil.–JOHN.
The infinite one Spirit
MORTAL existence is an enigma. Every day is a mystery. The testimony of the corporeal senses cannot inform us what is real and what is delusive, but the revelations of Christian Science unlock the treasures of Truth. Whatever is false or sinful can never enter the atmosphere of Spirit. There is but one Spirit. Man is never God, but spiritual man, made in God’s likeness, reflects God. In this scientific reflection the Ego and the Father are inseparable. The supposition that corporeal beings are spirits, or that there are good and evil spirits, is a mistake.
Real and unreal identity
The divine Mind maintains all identities, from a blade of grass to a star, as distinct and eternal. The questions are: What are God’s identities? What is Soul? Does life or soul exist in the thing formed?
Nothing is real and eternal,–nothing is Spirit,–but God and His idea. Evil has no reality. It is neither person, place, nor thing, but is simply a belief, an illusion of material sense.
The identity, or idea, of all reality continues forever; but Spirit, or the divine Principle of all, is not in Spirit’s formations. Soul is synonymous with Spirit, God, the creative, governing, infinite Principle outside of finite form, which forms only reflect.
Dream-lessons
Close your eyes, and you may dream that you see a flower,–that you touch and smell it. Thus you learn that the flower is a product of the so-called mind, a formation of thought rather than of matter. Close your eyes again, and you may see landscapes, men, and women. Thus you learn that these also are images, which mortal mind holds and evolves and which simulate mind, life, and intelligence. From dreams also you learn that neither mortal mind nor matter is the image or likeness of God, and that immortal Mind is not in matter.
Found wanting
When the Science of Mind is understood, spiritualism will be found mainly erroneous, having no scientific basis nor origin, no proof nor power outside of human testimony. It is the offspring of the physical senses. There is no sensuality in Spirit. I never could believe in spiritualism.
The basis and structure of spiritualism are alike material and physical. Its spirits are so many corporealities, limited and finite in character and quality. Spiritualism therefore presupposes Spirit, which is ever infinite, to be a corporeal being, a finite form,–a theory contrary to Christian Science.
There is but one spiritual existence,–the Life of which corporeal sense can take no cognizance. The divine Principle of man speaks through immortal sense. If a material body–in other words, mortal, material sense–were permeated by Spirit, that body would disappear to mortal sense, would be deathless. A condition precedent to communion with Spirit is the gain of spiritual life.
Spirits obsolete
So-called spirits are but corporeal communicators. As light destroys darkness and in the place of darkness all is light, so (in absolute Science) Soul, or God, is the only truth-giver to man. Truth destroys mortality, and brings to light immortality. Mortal belief (the material sense of life) and immortal Truth (the spiritual sense) are the tares and the wheat, which are not united by progress, but separated.
Perfection is not expressed through imperfection. Spirit is not made manifest through matter, the antipode of Spirit. Error is not a convenient sieve through which truth can be strained.
Scientific phenomena
God, good, being ever present, it follows in divine logic that evil, the suppositional opposite of good, is never present. In Science, individual good derived from God, the infinite All-in-all, may flow from the departed to mortals; but evil is neither communicable nor scientific. A sinning, earthly mortal is not the reality of Life nor the medium through which truth passes to earth. The joy of intercourse becomes the jest of sin, when evil and suffering are communicable. Not personal intercommunion but divine law is the communicator of truth, health, and harmony to earth and humanity. As readily can you mingle fire and frost as Spirit and matter. In either case, one does not support the other.
Spiritualism calls one person, living in this world, material, but another, who has died to-day a sinner and supposedly will return to earth to-morrow, it terms a spirit. The fact is that neither the one nor the other is infinite Spirit, for Spirit is God, and man is His likeness.
One government
The belief that one man, as spirit, can control another man, as matter, upsets both the individuality and the Science of man, for man is image. God controls man, and God is the only Spirit. Any other control or attraction of so-called spirit is a mortal belief, which ought to be known by its fruit, – the repetition of evil.
If Spirit, or God, communed with mortals or controlled them through electricity or any other form of matter, the divine order and the Science of omnipotent, omnipresent Spirit would be destroyed.
Incorrect theories
The belief that material bodies return to dust, hereafter to rise up as spiritual bodies with material sensations and desires, is incorrect. Equally incorrect is the belief that spirit is confined in a finite, material body, from which it is freed by death, and that, when it is freed from the material body, spirit retains the sensations belonging to that body.
No mediumship
It is a grave mistake to suppose that matter is any part of the reality of intelligent existence, or that Spirit and matter, intelligence and non-intelligence, can commune together. This error Science will destroy. The sensual cannot be made the mouthpiece of the spiritual, nor can the finite become the channel of the infinite. There is no communication between so called material existence and spiritual life which is not subject to death.
Opposing conditions
To be on communicable terms with Spirit, persons must be free from organic bodies; and their return to a material condition, after having once left it, would be as impossible as would be the restoration to its original condition of the acorn, already absorbed into a sprout which has risen above the soil. The seed which has germinated has a new form and state of existence. When here or hereafter the belief of life in matter is extinct, the error which has held the belief dissolves with the belief, and never returns to the old condition. No correspondence nor communion can exist between persons in such opposite dreams as the belief of having died and left a material body and the belief of still living in an organic, material body.
Bridgeless division
The caterpillar, transformed into a beautiful insect, is no longer a worm, nor does the insect return to fraternize with or control the worm. Such a backward transformation is impossible in Science. Darkness and light, infancy and manhood, sickness and health, are opposites,–different beliefs, which never blend. Who will say that infancy can utter the ideas of manhood, that darkness can represent light, that we are in Europe when we are in the opposite hemisphere? There is no bridge across the gulf which divides two such opposite conditions as the spiritual, or incorporeal, and the physical, or corporeal.
In Christian Science there is never a retrograde step, never a return to positions outgrown. The so-called dead and living cannot commune together, for they are in separate states of existence, or consciousness.
Unscientific investiture
This simple truth lays bare the mistaken assumption that man dies as matter but comes to life as spirit. The so-called dead, in order to reappear to those still in the existence cognized by the physical senses, would need to be tangible and material,–to have a material investiture,–or the material senses could take no cognizance of the so-called dead.
Spiritualism would transfer men from the spiritual sense of existence back into its material sense. This gross materialism is scientifically impossible, since to infinite Spirit there can be no matter.
Raising the dead
Jesus said of Lazarus: “Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.” Jesus restored Lazarus by the understanding that Lazarus had never died, not by an admission that his body had died and then lived again. Had Jesus believed that Lazarus had lived or died in his body, the Master would have stood on the same plane of belief as those who buried the body, and he could not have resuscitated it.
When you can waken yourself or others out of the belief that all must die, you can then exercise Jesus’ spiritual power to reproduce the presence of those who have thought they died,–but not otherwise.
Vision of the dying
There is one possible moment, when those living on the earth and those called dead, can commune together, and that is the moment previous to the transition, – the moment when the link between their opposite beliefs is being sundered. In the vestibule through which we pass from one dream to another dream, or when we awake from earth’s sleep to the grand verities of Life, the departing may hear the glad welcome of those who have gone before. The ones departing may whisper this vision, name the face that smiles on them and the hand which beckons them, as one at Niagara, with eyes open only to that wonder, forgets all else and breathes aloud his rapture.
Real Life is God
When being is understood, Life will be recognized as neither material nor finite, but as infinite,–as God, universal good; and the belief that life, or mind, was ever in a finite form, or good in evil, will be destroyed. Then it will be understood that Spirit never entered matter and was therefore never raised from matter. When advanced to spiritual being and the understanding of God, man can no longer commune with matter; neither can he return to it, any more than a tree can return to its seed. Neither will man seem to be corporeal, but he will be an individual consciousness, characterized by the divine Spirit as idea, not matter. Suffering, sinning, dying beliefs are unreal. When divine Science is universally understood, they will have no power over man, for man is immortal and lives by divine authority.
Immaterial pleasure
The sinless joy,–the perfect harmony and immortality of Life, possessing unlimited divine beauty and goodness without a single bodily pleasure or pain, constitutes the only veritable, indestructible man, whose being is spiritual. This state of existence is scientific and intact,–a perfection discernible only by those who have the final understanding of Christ in divine Science. Death can never hasten this state of existence, for death must be overcome, not submitted to, before immortality appears.
The recognition of Spirit and of infinity comes not suddenly here or hereafter. The pious Polycarp said: “I cannot turn at once from good to evil.” Neither do other mortals accomplish the change from error to truth at a single bound.
Second death
Existence continues to be a belief of corporeal sense until the Science of being is reached. Error brings its own self-destruction both here and hereafter, for mortal mind creates its own physical conditions. Death will occur on the next plane of existence as on this, until the spiritual understanding of Life is reached. Then, and not until then, will it be demonstrated that “the second death hath no power.”
A dream vanishing
The period required for this dream of material life, embracing its so-called pleasures and pains, to vanish from consciousness, “knoweth no man . . . neither the Son, but the Father.” This period will be of longer or shorter duration according to the tenacity of error. Of what advantage, then, would it be to us, or to the departed, to prolong the material state and so prolong the illusion either of a soul inert or of a sinning, suffering sense,–a so-called mind fettered to matter.
Progress and purgatory
Even if communications from spirits to mortal consciousness were possible, such communications would grow beautifully less with every advanced stage of existence. The departed would gradually rise above ignorance and materiality, and Spiritualists would outgrow their beliefs in material spiritualism. Spiritism consigns the so-called dead to a state resembling that of blighted buds,–to a wretched purgatory, where the chances of the departed for improvement narrow into nothing and they return to their old standpoints of matter.
Unnatural deflections
The decaying flower, the blighted bud, the gnarled oak, the ferocious beast,–like the discords of disease, sin, and death, – are unnatural. They are the falsities of sense, the changing deflections of mortal mind; they are not the eternal realities of Mind.
Absurd oracles
How unreasonable is the belief that we are wearing out life and hastening to death, and that at the same time we are communing with immortality! If the departed are in rapport with mortality, or matter, they are not spiritual, but must still be mortal, sinning, suffering, and dying. Then why look to them–even were communication possible–for proofs of immortality, and accept them as oracles? Communications gathered from ignorance are pernicious in tendency.
Spiritualism with its material accompaniments would destroy the supremacy of Spirit. If Spirit pervades all space, it needs no material method for the transmission of messages. Spirit needs no wires nor electricity in order to be omnipresent.
Spirit intangible
Spirit is not materially tangible. How then can it communicate with man through electric, material effects? How can the majesty and omnipotence of Spirit be lost? God is not in the medley where matter cares for matter, where spiritism makes many gods, and hypnotism and electricity are claimed to be the agents of God’s government.
Spirit blesses man, but man cannot “tell whence it cometh.” By it the sick are healed, the sorrowing are comforted, and the sinning are reformed. These are the effects of one universal God, the invisible good dwelling in eternal Science.
Thought regarding death
The act of describing disease–its symptoms, locality, and fatality–is not scientific. Warning people against death is an error that tends to frighten into death those who are ignorant of Life as God. Thousands of instances could be cited of health restored by changing the patient’s thoughts regarding death.
Fallacious hypotheses
A scientific mental method is more sanitary than the use of drugs, and such a mental method produces permanent health. Science must go over the whole ground, and dig up every seed of error’s sowing. Spiritualism relies upon human beliefs and hypotheses. Christian Science removes these beliefs and hypotheses through the higher understanding of God, for Christian Science, resting on divine Principle, not on material personalities, in its revelation of immortality, introduces the harmony of being.
Jesus cast out evil spirits, or false beliefs. The Apostle Paul bade men have the Mind that was in the Christ. Jesus did his own work by the one Spirit. He said: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” He never described disease, so far as can be learned from the Gospels, but he healed disease.
Mistaken methods
The unscientific practitioner says: “You are ill. Your brain is overtaxed, and you must rest. Your body is weak, and it must be strengthened. You have nervous prostration, and must be treated for it.” Science objects to all this, contending for the rights of intelligence and asserting that Mind controls body and brain.
Divine strength
Mind-science teaches that mortals need “not be weary in well doing.” It dissipates fatigue in doing good. Giving does not impoverish us in the service of our Maker, neither does withholding enrich us.
We have strength in proportion to our apprehension of the truth, and our strength is not lessened by giving utterance to truth. A cup of coffee or tea is not the equal of truth, whether for the inspiration of a sermon or for the support of bodily endurance.
A denial of immortality
A communication purporting to come from the late Theodore Parker reads as follows: “There never was, and there never will be, an immortal spirit.” Yet the very periodical containing this sentence repeats weekly the assertion that spirit-communications are our only proofs of immortality.
Mysticism unscientific
I entertain no doubt of the humanity and philanthropy of many Spiritualists, but I cannot coincide with their views. It is mysticism which gives spiritualism its force. Science dispels mystery and explains extraordinary phenomena; but Science never removes phenomena from the domain of reason into the realm of mysticism.
Physical falsities
It should not seem mysterious that mind, without the aid of hands, can move a table, when we already know that it is mind-power which moves both table and hand. Even planchette–the French toy which years ago pleased so many people – attested the control of mortal mind over its substratum, called matter.
It is mortal mind which convulses its substratum, matter. These movements arise from the volition of human belief, but they are neither scientific nor rational. Mortal mind produces table-tipping as certainly as table-setting, and believes that this wonder emanates from spirits and electricity. This belief rests on the common conviction that mind and matter cooperate both visibly and invisibly, hence that matter is intelligent.
Poor post-mortem evidence
There is not so much evidence to prove intercommunication between the so-called dead and the living, as there is to show the sick that matter suffers and has sensation; yet this latter evidence is destroyed by the Mind-science. If Spiritualists understood the Science of being, their belief in mediumship would vanish.
No proof of immortality
At the very best and on its own theories, spiritualism can only prove that certain individuals have a continued existence after death and maintain their affiliation with mortal flesh; but this fact affords no certainty of everlasting life. A man’s assertion that he is immortal no more proves him to be so, than the opposite assertion, that he is mortal, would prove immortality a lie. Nor is the case improved when alleged spirits teach immortality. Life, Love, Truth, is the only proof of immortality.
Mind’s manifestations immortal
Man in the likeness of God as revealed in Science cannot help being immortal. Though the grass seemeth to wither and the flower to fade, they reappear. Erase the figures which express number, silence the tones of music, give to the worms the body called man, and yet the producing, governing, divine Principle lives on,–in the case of man as truly as in the case of numbers and of music,–despite the so-called laws of matter, which define man as mortal. Though the inharmony resulting from material sense hides the harmony of Science, inharmony cannot destroy the divine Principle of Science. In Science, man’s immortality depends upon that of God, good, and follows as a necessary consequence of the immortality of good.
Reading thoughts
That somebody, somewhere, must have known the deceased person, supposed to be the communicator, is evident, and it is as easy to read distant thoughts as near. We think of an absent friend as easily as we do of one present. It is no more difficult to read the absent mind than it is to read the present. Chaucer wrote centuries ago, yet we still read his thought in his verse. What is classic study, but discernment of the minds of Homer and Virgil, of whose personal existence we may be in doubt?
Impossible intercommunion
If spiritual life has been won by the departed, they cannot return to material existence, because different states of consciousness are involved, and one person cannot exist in two different states of consciousness at the same time. In sleep we do not communicate with the dreamer by our side despite his physical proximity, because both of us are either unconscious or are wandering in our dreams through different mazes of consciousness.
In like manner it would follow, even if our departed friends were near us and were in as conscious a state of existence as before the change we call death, that their state of consciousness must be different from ours. We are not in their state, nor are they in the mental realm in which we dwell. Communion between them and ourselves would be prevented by this difference. The mental states are so unlike, that intercommunion is as impossible as it would be between a mole and a human being. Different dreams and different awakenings betoken a differing consciousness. When wandering in Australia, do we look for help to the Esquimaux in their snow huts?
In a world of sin and sensuality hastening to a greater development of power, it is wise earnestly to consider whether it is the human mind or the divine Mind which is influencing one. What the prophets of Jehovah did, the worshippers of Baal failed to do; yet artifice and delusion claimed that they could equal the work of wisdom.
Science only can explain the incredible good and evil elements now coming to the surface. Mortals must find refuge in Truth in order to escape the error of these latter days. Nothing is more antagonistic to Christian Science than a blind belief without understanding, for such a belief hides Truth and builds on error.
Natural wonders
Miracles are impossible in Science, and here Science takes issue with popular religions. The scientific manifestation of power is from the divine nature and is not supernatural, since Science is an explication of nature. The belief that the universe, including man, is governed in general by material laws, but that occasionally Spirit sets aside these laws, – this belief belittles omnipotent wisdom, and gives to matter the precedence over Spirit.
Conflicting standpoints
It is contrary to Christian Science to suppose that life is either material or organically spiritual. Between Christian Science and all forms of superstition a great gulf is fixed, as impassable as that between Dives and Lazarus. There is mortal mind-reading and immortal Mind-reading. The latter is a revelation of divine purpose through spiritual understanding, by which man gains the divine Principle and explanation of all things. Mortal mind-reading and immortal Mindreading are distinctly opposite standpoints, from which cause and effect are interpreted. The act of reading mortal mind investigates and touches only human beliefs.
Science is immortal and coordinate neither with the premises nor with the conclusions of mortal beliefs.
Scientific foreseeing
The ancient prophets gained their foresight from a spiritual, incorporeal standpoint, not by foreshadowing evil and mistaking fact for fiction, – predicting the future from a groundwork of corporeality and human belief. When sufficiently advanced in Science to be in harmony with the truth of being, men become seers and prophets involuntarily, controlled not by demons, spirits, or demigods, but by the one Spirit. It is the prerogative of the ever-present, divine Mind, and of thought which is in rapport with this Mind, to know the past, the present, and the future.
Acquaintance with the Science of being enables us to commune more largely with the divine Mind, to foresee and foretell events which concern the universal welfare, to be divinely inspired, – yea, to reach the range of fetterless Mind.
The Mind unbounded
To understand that Mind is infinite, not bounded by corporeality, not dependent upon the ear and eye for sound or sight nor upon muscles and bones for locomotion, is a step towards the Mindscience by which we discern man’s nature and existence. This true conception of being destroys the belief of spiritualism at its very inception, for without the concession of material personalities called spirits, spiritualism has no basis upon which to build.
Scientific foreknowing
All we correctly know of Spirit comes from God, divine Principle, and is learned through Christ and Christian Science. If this Science has been thoroughly learned and properly digested, we can know the truth more accurately than the astronomer can read the stars or calculate an eclipse. This Mind-reading is the opposite of clairvoyance. It is the illumination of the spiritual understanding which demonstrates the capacity of Soul, not of material sense. This Soul-sense comes to the human mind when the latter yields to the divine Mind.
Value of intuition
Such intuitions reveal whatever constitutes and perpetuates harmony, enabling one to do good, but not evil. You will reach the perfect Science of healing when you are able to read the human mind after this manner and discern the error you would destroy. The Samaritan woman said: “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?”
It is recorded that Jesus, as he once journeyed with his students, “knew their thoughts,” – read them scientifically. In like manner he discerned disease and healed the sick. After the same method, events of great moment were foretold by the Hebrew prophets. Our Master rebuked the lack of this power when he said: “O ye hypocrites! ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?”
Hyprocrisy condemned
Both Jew and Gentile may have had acute corporeal senses, but mortals need spiritual sense. Jesus knew the generation to be wicked and adulterous, seeking the material more than the spiritual. His thrusts at materialism were sharp, but needed. He never spared hypocrisy the sternest condemnation.. He said : “These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.” The great Teacher knew both cause and effect, knew that truth communicates itself but never imparts error.
Mental contact
Jesus once asked, “Who touched me?” Supposing this inquiry to be occasioned by physical contact alone, his disciples answered, “The multitude throng thee.” Jesus knew, as others did not, that it was not matter, but mortal mind, whose touch called for aid. Repeating his inquiry, he was answered by the faith of a sick woman. His quick apprehension of this mental call illustrated his spirituality. The disciples’ misconception of it uncovered their materiality. Jesus possessed more spiritual susceptibility than the disciples. Opposites come from contrary directions, and produce unlike results.
Images of thought
Mortals evolve images of thought. These may appear to the ignorant to be apparitions; but they are mysterious only because it is unusual to see thoughts, though we can always feel their influence. Haunted houses, ghostly voices, unusual noises, and apparitions brought out in dark seances either involve feats by tricksters, or they are images and sounds evolved involuntarily by mortal mind. Seeing is no less a quality of physical sense than feeling. Then why is it more difficult to see a thought than to feel one? Education alone determines the difference. In reality there is none.
Phenomena explained
Portraits, landscape-paintings, fac-similes of penmanship, peculiarities of expression, recollected sentences, can all be taken from pictorial thought and memory as readily as from objects cognizable by the senses. Mortal mind sees what it believes as certainly as it believes what it sees. It feels, hears, and sees its own thoughts. Pictures are mentally formed before the artist can convey them to canvas. So is it with all material conceptions. Mind-readers perceive these pictures of thought. They copy or reproduce them, even when they are lost to the memory of the mind in which they are discoverable.
Mental environment
It is needless for the thought or for the person holding the transferred picture to be individually and consciously present. Though individuals have passed away, their mental environment re- mains to be discerned, described, and transmitted. Though bodies are leagues apart and their associations forgotten, their associations float in the general atmosphere of human mind.
Second sight
The Scotch call such vision “second sight”, when really it is first sight instead of second, for it presents primal facts to mortal mind. Science enables one to read the human mind, but not as a clairvoyant. It enables one to heal through Mind, but not as a mesmerist.
Buried secrets
The mine knows naught of the emeralds within its rocks; the sea is ignorant of the gems within its caverns, of the corals, of its sharp reefs, of the tall ships that float on its bosom, or of the bodies which lie buried in its sands: yet these are all there. Do not suppose that any mental concept is gone because you do not think of it. The true concept is never lost. The strong impressions produced on mortal mind by friendship or by any intense feeling are lasting, and mindreaders can perceive and reproduce these impressions.
Recollected friends
Memory may reproduce voices long ago silent. We have but to close the eyes, and forms rise before us, which are thousands of miles away or altogether gone from physical sight and sense, and this not in dreamy sleep. In our day-dreams we can recall that for which the poet Tennyson expressed the heart’s desire, the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still. The mind may even be cognizant of a present flavor and odor, when no viand touches the palate and no scent salutes the nostrils.
Illusions not ideas
How are veritable ideas to be distinguished from illusions? By learning the origin of each. Ideas are emanations from the divine Mind. Thoughts, proceeding from the brain or from matter, are offshoots of mortal mind; they are mortal material beliefs. Ideas are spiritual, harmonious, and eternal. Beliefs proceed from the so-called material senses, which at one time are supposed to be substance-matter and at another are called spirits.
To love one’s neighbor as one’s self, is a divine idea; but this idea can never be seen, felt, nor understood through the physical senses. Excite the organ of veneration or religious faith, and the individual manifests profound adoration. Excite the opposite development, and he blasphemes. These effects, however, do not proceed from Christianity, nor are they spiritual phenomena, for both arise from mortal belief.
Trance speaking illusion
Eloquence re-echoes the strains of Truth and Love. It is due to inspiration rather than to erudition. It shows the possibilities derived from divine Mind, though it is said to be a gift whose endowment is obtained from books or received from the impulsion of departed spirits. When eloquence proceeds from the belief that a departed spirit is speaking, who can tell what the unaided medium is incapable of knowing or uttering? This phenomenon only shows that the beliefs of mortal mind are loosed. Forgetting her ignorance in the belief that another mind is speaking through her, the devotee may become unwontedly eloquent. Having more faith in others than in herself, and believing that somebody else possesses her tongue and mind, she talks freely.
Destroy her belief in outside aid, and her eloquence disappears. The former limits of her belief return. She says, ” I am incapable of words that glow, for I am uneducated.” This familiar instance reaffirms the Scriptural word concerning a man, “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” If one believes that he cannot be an orator without study or a superinduced condition, the body responds to this belief, and the tongue grows mute which before was eloquent.
Scientific improvisation
Mind is not necessarily dependent upon educational processes. It possesses of itself all beauty and poetry, and the power of expressing them. Spirit, God, is heard when the senses are silent. We are all capable of more than we do. The influence or action of Soul confers a freedom, which explains the phenomena of improvisation and the fervor of untutored lips.
Divine origination
Matter is neither intelligent nor creative. The tree is not the author of itself. Sound is not the originator of music, and man is not the father of man. Cain very naturally concluded that if life was in the body, and man gave it, man had the right to take it away. This incident shows that the belief of life in matter was “a murderer from the beginning.”
If seed is necessary to produce wheat, and wheat to produce flour, or if one animal can originate another, how then can we account for their primal origin? How were the loaves and fishes multiplied on the shores of Galilee,–and that, too, without meal or monad from which loaf or fish could come?
Mind is substance
The earth’s orbit and the imaginary line called the equator are not substance. The earth’s motion and position are sustained by Mind alone. Divest yourself of the thought that there can be substance in matter, and the movements and transitions now possible for mortal mind will be found to be equally possible for the body. Then being will be recognized as spiritual, and death will be obsolete, though now some insist that death is the necessary prelude to immortality.
Mortal delusions
In dreams we fly to Europe and meet a far-off friend. The looker-on sees the body in bed, but the supposed inhabitant of that body carries it through the air and over the ocean. This shows the possibilities of thought. Opium and hashish eaters mentally travel far and work wonders, yet their bodies stay in one place. This shows what mortal mentality and knowledge are.
Scientific finalities
The admission to one’s self that man is God’s own likeness sets man free to master the infinite idea. This conviction shuts the door on death, and opens it wide towards immortality. The understanding and recognition of Spirit must finally come, and we may as well improve our time in solving the mysteries of being through an apprehension of divine Principle. At present we know not what man is, but we certainly shall know this when man reflects God.
The Revelator tells us of “a new heaven and a new earth.” Have you ever pictured this heaven and earth, inhabited by beings under the control of supreme wisdom?
Let us rid ourselves of the belief that man is separated from God, and obey only the divine principle, Life and Love. Here is the great point of departure for all true spiritual growth.
Man’s genuine being
It is difficult for the sinner to accept divine Science, because Science exposes his nothingness; but the sooner error is reduced to its native nothingness, the sooner man’s great reality will appear and his genuine being will be understood. The destruction of error is by no means the destruction of Truth or Life, but is the acknowledgment of them. Absorbed in material selfhood we discern and reflect but faintly the substance of Life or Mind. The denial of material selfhood aids the discernment of man’s spiritual and eternal individuality, and destroys the erroneous knowledge gained from matter or through what are termed the material senses.
Erroneous postulates
Certain erroneous postulates should be here considered in order that the spiritual facts may be better apprehended. The first erroneous postulate of belief is, that substance, life, and intelligence are something apart from God.
The second erroneous postulate is, that man is both mental and material.
The third erroneous postulate is, that mind is both evil and good; whereas the real Mind cannot be evil nor the medium of evil, for Mind is God.
The fourth erroneous postulate is, that matter is intelligent, and that man has a material body which is part of himself.
The fifth erroneous postulate is, that matter holds in itself the issues of life and death,–that matter is not only capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, but also capable of imparting these sensations. From the illusion implied in this last postulate arises the decomposition of mortal bodies in what is termed death.
Mind is not an entity within the cranium with the power of sinning now and forever.
Knowledge of good and evil
In old Scriptural pictures we see a serpent coiled around the tree of knowledge and speaking to Adam and Eve. This represents the serpent in the act of commending to our first parents the knowledge of good and evil, a knowledge gained from matter, or evil, instead of from Spirit. The portrayal is still graphically accurate, for the common conception of mortal man–a burlesque of God’s man–is an outgrowth of human knowledge or sensuality, a mere offshoot of material sense.
Opposing power
Uncover error, and it turns the lie upon you. Until the fact concerning error – namely, its nothingness appears, the moral demand will not be met, and the ability to make nothing of error will be wanting. We should blush to call that real which is only a mistake. The foundation of evil is laid on a belief in something besides God. This belief tends to support two opposite powers, instead of urging the claims of Truth alone. The mistake of thinking that error can be real, when it is merely the absence of truth, leads to belief in the superiority of error.
The age’s privilege
Do you say the time has not yet come in which to recognize Soul as substantial and able to control the body? Remember Jesus, who nearly nineteen centuries ago demonstrated the power of Spirit and said, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also,” and who also said, “But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation,” said Paul.
Logic and revelation
Divine logic and revelation coincide. If we believe otherwise, we may be sure that either our logic is at fault or that we have misinterpreted revelation. Good never causes evil, nor creates aught that can cause evil.
Good does not create a mind susceptible of causing evil, for evil is the opposing error and not the truth of creation. Destructive electricity is not the offspring of infinite good. Whatever contradicts the real nature of the divine Esse, though human faith may clothe it with angelic vestments, is without foundation.
Derivatives of spirit
The belief that Spirit is finite as well as infinite has darkened all history. In Christian Science, Spirit, as a proper noun, is the name of the Supreme Being. It means quantity and quality, and applies exclusively to God. The modifying derivatives of the word spirit refer only to quality, not to God. Man is spiritual. He is not God, Spirit. If man were Spirit, then men would be spirits, gods. Finite spirit would be mortal, and this is the error embodied in the belief that the infinite can be contained in the finite. This belief tends to becloud our apprehension of the kingdom of heaven and of the reign of harmony in the Science of being.
Scientific man
Jesus taught but one God, one Spirit, who makes man in the image and likeness of Himself,–of Spirit, not of matter. Man reflects infinite Truth, Life, and Love. The nature of man, thus understood, includes all that is implied by the terms “image” and “likeness” as used in Scripture. The truly Christian and scientific statement of personality and of the relation of man to God, with the demonstration which accompanied it, incensed the rabbis, and they said: “Crucify him, crucify him . . . by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.”
The eastern empires and nations owe their false government to the misconceptions of Deity there prevalent. Tyranny, intolerance, and bloodshed, wherever found, arise from the belief that the infinite is formed after the pattern of mortal personality, passion, and impulse.
Ingratitude and denial
The progress of truth confirms its claims, and our Master confirmed his words by his works. His healingpower evoked denial, ingratitude, and betrayal, arising from sensuality. Of the ten lepers whom Jesus healed, but one returned to give God thanks,–that is, to acknowledge the divine Principle which had healed him.
Spiritual insight
Our Master easily read the thoughts of mankind, and this insight better enabled him to direct those thoughts aright; but what would be said at this period of an infidel blasphemer who should hint that Jesus used his incisive power injuriously? Our Master read mortal mind on a scientific basis, that of the omnipresence of Mind. An approximation of this discernment indicates spiritual growth and union with the infinite capacities of the one Mind. Jesus could injure no one by his Mind-reading.
The effect of his Mind was always to heal and to save, and this is the only genuine Science of reading mortal mind. His holy motives and aims were traduced by the sinners of that period, as they would be to-day if Jesus were personally present. Paul said, “To be spiritually minded is life.” We approach God, or Life, in proportion to our spirituality, our fidelity to Truth and Love; and in that ratio we know all human need and are able to discern the thought of the sick and the sinning for the purpose of healing them. Error of any kind cannot hide from the law of God.
Whoever reaches this point of moral culture and goodness cannot injure others, and must do them good. The greater or lesser ability of a Christian Scientist to discern thought scientifically, depends upon his genuine spirituality. This kind of mind-reading is not clairvoyance, but it is important to success in healing, and is one of the special characteristics thereof.
Christ’s reappearance
We welcome the increase of knowledge and the end of error, because even human invention must have its day, and we want that day to be succeeded by Christian Science, by divine reality. Midnight foretells the dawn. Led by a solitary star amid the darkness, the Magi of old foretold the Messiahship of Truth. Is the wise man of to-day believed, when he beholds the light which heralds Christ’s eternal dawn and describes its effulgence?
Spiritual awakening
Lulled by stupefying illusions, the world is asleep in the cradle of infancy, dreaming away the hours. Material sense does not unfold the facts of existence; but spiritual sense lifts human consciousness into eternal Truth. Humanity advances slowly out of sinning sense into spiritual understanding; unwillingness to learn all things rightly, binds Christendom with chains.
The darkest hours of all
Love will finally mark the hour of harmony, and spiritualization will follow, for Love is Spirit. Before error is wholly destroyed, there will be interruptions of the general material routine. Earth will become dreary and desolate, but summer and winter, seedtime and harvest (though in changed forms), will continue unto the end,–until the final spiritualization of all things. “The darkest hour precedes the dawn.”
Arena of contest
This material world is even now becoming the arena for conflicting forces. On one side there will be discord and dismay; on the other side there will be Science and peace. The breaking up of material beliefs may seem to be famine and pestilence, want and woe, sin, sickness, and death, which assume new phases until their nothingness appears. These disturbances will continue until the end of error, when all discord will be swallowed up in spiritual Truth.
Mortal error will vanish in a moral chemicalization. This mental fermentation has begun, and will continue until all errors of belief yield to understanding. Belief is changeable, but spiritual understanding is changeless.
Millennial glory
As this consummation draws nearer, he who has shaped his course in accordance with divine Science will endure to the end. As material knowledge diminishes and spiritual understanding increases, real objects will be apprehended mentally instead of materially.
During this final conflict, wicked minds will endeavor to find means by which to accomplish more evil; but those who discern Christian Science will hold crime in check. They will aid in the ejection of error. They will maintain law and order, and cheerfully await the certainty of ultimate perfection.
Dangerous resemblances
In reality, the more closely error simulates truth and so-called matter resembles its essence, mortal mind, the more impotent error becomes as a belief. According to human belief, the lightning is fierce and the electric current swift, yet in Christian Science the flight of one and the blow of the other will become harmless. The more destructive matter becomes, the more its nothingness will appear, until matter reaches its mortal zenith in illusion and forever disappears. The nearer a false belief approaches truth without passing the boundary where, having been destroyed by divine Love, it ceases to be even an illusion, the riper it becomes for destruction. The more material the belief, the more obvious its error, until divine Spirit, supreme in its domain, dominates all matter, and man is found in the likeness of Spirit, his original being.
The broadest facts array the most falsities against themselves, for they bring error from under cover. It requires courage to utter truth; for the higher Truth lifts her voice, the louder will error scream, until its inarticulate sound is forever silenced in oblivion.
“He uttered His voice, the earth melted.” This Scripture indicates that all matter will disappear before the supremacy of Spirit.
Christianity still rejected
Christianity is again demonstrating the Life that is Truth, and the Truth that is Life, by the apostolic work of casting out error and healing the sick. Earth has no repayment for the persecutions which attend a new step in Christianity; but the spiritual recompense of the persecuted is assured in the elevation of existence above mortal discord and in the gift of divine Love.
Spiritual foreshadowings
The prophet of to-day beholds in the mental horizon the signs of these times, the reappearance of the Christianity which heals the sick and destroys error, and no other sign shall be given. Body cannot be saved except through Mind. The Science of Christianity is misinterpreted by a material age, for it is the healing influence of Spirit (not spirits) which the material senses cannot comprehend, which can only be spiritually discerned. Creeds, doctrines, and human hypotheses do not express Christian Science; much less can they demonstrate it.
Revelation of Science
Beyond the frail premises of human beliefs, above the loosening grasp of creeds, the demonstration of Christian Mind-healing stands a revealed and practical Science. It is imperious throughout all ages as Christ’s revelation of Truth, of Life, and of Love, which remains inviolate for every man to understand and to practise.
Science as foreign to all religion
For centuries–yea, always–natural science has not been considered a part of any religion, Christianity not excepted. Even now multitudes consider that which they call science has no proper connection with faith and piety. Mystery does not enshroud Christ’s teachings, and they are not theoretical and fragmentary, but practical and complete; and being practical and complete, they are not deprived of their essential vitality.
Key to the kingdom
The way through which immortality and life are learned is not ecclesiastical but Christian, not human but divine, not physical but metaphysical, not material but scientifically spiritual. Human philosophy, ethics, and superstition afford no demonstrable divine Principle by which mortals can escape from sin; yet to escape from sin, is what the Bible demands. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” says the apostle, and he straightway adds: “for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure” (Philippians ii. 12, 13). Truth has furnished the key to the kingdom, and with this key Christian Science has opened the door of the human understanding. None may pick the lock nor enter by some other door. The ordinary teachings are material and not spiritual. Christian Science teaches only that which is spiritual and divine, and not human. Christian Science is unerring and Divine; the human sense of things errs because it is human.
Those individuals, who adopt theosophy, spiritualism, or hypnotism, may possess natures above some others who eschew their false beliefs. Therefore my contest is not with the individual, but with the false system. I love mankind, and shall continue to labor and to endure.
The calm, strong currents of true spirituality, the manifestations of which are health, purity, and selfimmolation, must deepen human experience, until the beliefs of material existence are seen to be a bald imposition, and sin, disease, and death give everlasting place to the scientific demonstration of divine Spirit and to God’s spiritual, perfect man.
Chapter V – Animal Magnetism Unmasked
For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: these are the things which defile a man.– JESUS.
Earliest investigations
MESMERISM or animal magnetism was first brought into notice by Mesmer in Germany in 1775. According to the American Cyclopaedia, he regarded this so-called force, which he said could be exerted by one living organism over another, as a means of alleviating disease. His propositions were as follows :
“There exists a mutual influence between the celestial bodies, the earth, and animated things. Animal bodies are susceptible to the influence of this agent, disseminating itself through the substance of the nerves.”
In 1784, the French government ordered the medical faculty of Paris to investigate Mesmer’s theory and to report upon it. Under this order a commission was appointed, and Benjamin Franklin was one of the commissioners. This commission reported to the government as follows:
“In regard to the existence and utility of animal magnetism, we have come to the unanimous conclusions that there is no proof of the existence of the animal magnetic fluid; that the violent effects, which are observed in the public practice of magnetism, are due to manipulations, or to the excitement of the imagination and the impressions made upon the senses; and that there is one more fact to be recorded in the history of the errors of the human mind, and an important experiment upon the power of the imagination.”
Clairvoyance, magnetism
In 1837, a committee of nine persons was appointed, among whom were Roux, Bouillaud, and Cloquet, which tested during several sessions the phenomena exhibited by a reputed clairvoyant. Their report stated the results as follows:
“The facts which had been promised by Monsieur Berna [the magnetizer] as conclusive, and as adapted to throw light on physiological and therapeutical questions, are certainly not conclusive in favor of the doctrine of animal magnetism, and have nothing in common with either physiology or therapeutics.”
This report was adopted by the Royal Academy of Medicine in Paris.
Personal conclusions
The author’s own observations of the workings of animal magnetism convince her that it is not a remedial agent, and that its effects upon those who practise it, and upon their subjects who do not resist it, lead to moral and to physical death.
If animal magnetism seems to alleviate or to cure disease, this appearance is deceptive, since error cannot remove the effects of error. Discomfort under error is preferable to comfort. In no instance is the effect of animal magnetism, recently called hypnotism, other than the effect of illusion. Any seeming benefit derived from it is proportional to one’s faith in esoteric magic.
Mere negation
Animal magnetism has no scientific foundation, for God governs all that is real, harmonious, and eternal, and His power is neither animal nor human. Its basis being a belief and this belief animal, in Science animal magnetism, mesmerism, or hypnotism is a mere negation, possessing neither intelligence, power, nor reality, and in sense it is an unreal concept of the socalled mortal mind.
There is but one real attraction, that of Spirit. The pointing of the needle to the pole symbolizes this allembracing power or the attraction of God, divine Mind.
The planets have no more power over man than over his Maker, since God governs the universe; but man, reflecting God’s power, has dominion over all the earth and its hosts.
Hidden agents
The mild forms of animal magnetism are disappearing, and its aggressive features are coming to the front. The looms of crime, hidden in the dark recesses of mortal thought, are every hour weaving webs more complicated and subtle. So secret are the present methods of animal magnetism that they ensnare the age into indolence, and produce the very apathy on the subject which the criminal desires. The following is an extract from the Boston Herald:
“Mesmerism is a problem not lending itself to an easy explanation and development. It implies the exercise of despotic control, and is much more likely to be abused by its possessor, than otherwise employed, for the individual or society.”
Mental despotism
Mankind must learn that evil is not power. Its socalled despotism is but a phase of nothingness. Christian Science despoils the kingdom of evil, and pre-eminently promotes affection and virtue in families and therefore in the community. The Apostle Paul refers to the personification of evil as “the god of this world,” and further defines it as dishonesty and craftiness. Sin was the Assyrian moon-god.
Liberation of mental powers
The destruction of the claims of mortal mind through Science, by which man can escape from sin and mortality, blesses the whole human family. As in the beginning, however, this liberation does not scientifically show itself in a knowledge of both good and evil, for the latter is unreal.
On the other hand, Mind-science is wholly separate from any half-way impertinent knowledge, because Mindscience is of God and demonstrates the divine Principle, working out the purposes of good only. The maximum of good is the infinite God and His idea, the All-in-all. Evil is a suppositional lie.
The genus of error
As named in Christian Science, animal magnetism or hypnotism is the specific term for error, or mortal mind. It is the false belief that mind is in matter, and is both evil and good; that evil is as real as good and more powerful. This belief has not one quality of Truth. It is either ignorant or malicious. The malicious form of hypnotism ultimates in moral idiocy. The truths of immortal Mind sustain man, and they annihilate the fables of mortal mind, whose flimsy and gaudy pretensions, like silly moths, singe their own wings and fall into dust.
Thought-transference
In reality there is no mortal mind, and consequently no transference of mortal thought and will-power. Life and being are of God. In Christian Science, man can do no harm, for scientific thoughts are true thoughts, passing from God to man.
When Christian Science and animal magnetism are both comprehended, as they will be at no distant date, it will be seen why the author of this book has been so unjustly persecuted and belied by wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Agassiz, the celebrated naturalist and author, has wisely said: “Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next, they say it has been discovered before. Lastly, they say they have always believed it.”
Perfection of divine government
Christian Science goes to the bottom of mental action, and reveals the theodicy which indicates the rightness of all divine action, as the emanation of divine Mind, and the consequent wrongness of the opposite so-called action,–evil, occultism, necromancy, mesmerism, animal magnetism, hypnotism.
Adulteration of Truth
The medicine of Science is divine Mind; and dishonesty, sensuality, falsehood, revenge, malice, are animal propensities and by no means the mental qualities which heal the sick. The hypnotizer employs one error to destroy another. If he heals sickness through a belief, and a belief originally caused the sickness, it is a case of the greater error overcoming the lesser. This greater error thereafter occupies the ground, leaving the case worse than before it was grasped by the stronger error.
Motives considered
Our courts recognize evidence to prove the motive as well as the commission of a crime. Is it not clear that the human mind must move the body to a wicked act? Is not mortal mind the murderer? The hands, without mortal mind to direct them, could not commit a murder.
Mental crimes
Courts and juries judge and sentence mortals in order to restrain crime, to prevent deeds of violence or to punish them. To say that these tribunals have no jurisdiction over the carnal or mortal mind, would be to contradict precedent and to admit that the power of human law is restricted to matter, while mortal mind, evil, which is the real outlaw, defies justice and is recommended to mercy. Can matter commit a crime? Can matter be punished? Can you separate the mentality from the body over which courts hold jurisdiction? Mortal mind, not matter, is the criminal in every case; and human law rightly estimates crime, and courts reasonably pass sentence, according to the motive.
Important decision
When our laws eventually take cognizance of mental crime and no longer apply legal rulings wholly to physical offences, these words of Judge Parmenter of Boston will become historic: “I see no reason why metaphysics is not as important to medicine as to mechanics or mathematics.”
Evil let loose
Whoever uses his developed mental powers like an escaped felon to commit fresh atrocities as opportunity occurs is never safe. God will arrest him. Divine justice will manacle him. His sins will be millstones about his neck, weighing him down to the depths of ignominy and death. The aggravation of error foretells its doom, and confirms the ancient axiom: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
The misuse of mental power
The distance from ordinary medical practice to Christian Science is full many a league in the line of light; but to go in healing from the use of inanimate drugs to the criminal misuse of human willpower, is to drop from the platform of common manhood into the very mire of iniquity, to work against the free course of honesty and justice, and to push vainly against the current running heavenward.
Proper self-government
Like our nation, Christian Science has its Declaration of Independence. God has endowed man with inalienable rights, among which are self-government, reason, and conscience. Man is properly selfgoverned only when he is guided rightly and governed by his Maker, divine Truth and Love.
Man’s rights are invaded when the divine order is interfered with, and the mental trespasser incurs the divine penalty due this crime.
Right methods
Let this age, which sits in judgment on Christian Science, sanction only such methods as are demonstrable in Truth and known by their fruit, and classify all others as did St. Paul in his great epistle to the Galatians, when he wrote as follows:
“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.”
Chapter VI – Science, Theology, Medicine
But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.–PAUL.
The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.–JESUS.
Christian Science discovered
In the year 1866, I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science. God had been graciously preparing me during many years for the reception of this final revelation of the absolute divine Principle of scientific mental healing.
Mission of Christian Science
This apodictical Principle points to the revelation of Immanuel, “God with us,” – the sovereign ever-presence, delivering the children of men from every ill “that flesh is heir to.” Through Christian Science, religion and medicine are inspired with a diviner nature and essence; fresh pinions are given to faith and understanding, and thoughts acquaint themselves intelligently with God.
Discontent with life
Feeling so perpetually the false consciousness that life inheres in the body, yet remembering that in reality God is our Life, we may well tremble in the prospect of those days in which we must say, “I have no pleasure in them.”
Whence came to me this heavenly conviction, – a conviction antagonistic to the testimony of the physical senses? According to St. Paul, it was “the gift of the grace of God given unto me by the effectual working of His power.” It was the divine law of Life and Love, unfolding to me the demonstrable fact that matter possesses neither sensation nor life; that human experiences show the falsity of all material things; and that immortal cravings, “the price of learning love,” establish the truism that the only sufferer is mortal mind, for the divine Mind cannot suffer.
Demonstrable evidence
My conclusions were reached by allowing the evidence of this revelation to multiply with mathematical certainty and the lesser demonstration to prove the greater, as the product of three multiplied by three, equalling nine, proves conclusively that three times three duodecillions must be nine duodecillions,–not a fraction more, not a unit less.
Light shining in darkness
When apparently near the confines of mortal existence, standing already within the shadow of the death-valley, I learned these truths in divine Science: that all real being is in God, the divine Mind, and that Life, Truth, and Love are all-powerful and everpresent; that the opposite of Truth,–called error, sin, sickness, disease, death,–is the false testimony of false material sense, of mind in matter; that this false sense evolves, in belief, a subjective state of mortal mind which this same so-called mind names matter thereby shutting out the true sense of Spirit.
New lines of thought
My discovery, that erring, mortal, misnamed mind produces all the organism and action of the mortal body, set my thoughts to work in new channels, and led up to my demonstration of the proposition that Mind is All and matter is naught as the leading factor in Mind-science.
Scientific evidence
Christian Science reveals incontrovertibly that Mind is All-in-all, that the only realities are the divine Mind and idea. This great fact is not, however, seen to be supported by sensible evidence, until its divine Principle is demonstrated by healing the sick and thus proved absolute and divine. This proof once seen, no other conclusion can be reached.
Solitary research
For three years after my discovery, I sought the solution of this problem of Mind-healing, searched the Scriptures and read little else, kept aloof from society, and devoted time and energies to discovering a positive rule. The search was sweet, calm, and buoyant with hope, not selfish nor depressing. I knew the Principle of all harmonious Mind-action to be God, and that cures were produced in primitive Christian healing by holy, uplifting faith; but I must know the Science of this healing, and I won my way to absolute conclusions through divine revelation, reason, and demonstration. The revelation of Truth in the understanding came to me gradually and apparently through divine power. When a new spiritual idea is borne to earth, the prophetic Scripture of Isaiah is renewedly fulfilled: “Unto us a child is born, . . . and his name shall be called Wonderful.”
Jesus once said of his lessons: “My doctrine is not mine, but His that sent me. If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” (John vii. 16, 17.)
God’s allness learned The three great verities of Spirit, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience,–Spirit possessing all power, filling all space, constituting all Science,–contradict forever the belief that matter can be actual. These eternal verities reveal primeval existence as the radiant reality of God’s creation, in which all that He has made is pronounced by His wisdom good.
Thus it was that I beheld, as never before, the awful unreality called evil. The equipollence of God brought to light another glorious proposition, – man’s perfectibility and the establishment of the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Scriptural foundations
In following these leadings of scientific revelation, the Bible was my only textbook. The Scriptures were illumined; reason and revelation were reconciled, and afterwards the truth of Christian Science was demonstrated. No human pen nor tongue taught me the Science contained in this book, SCIENCE AND HEALTH; and neither tongue nor pen can overthrow it. This book may be distorted by shallow criticism or by careless or malicious students, and its ideas may be temporarily abused and misrepresented; but the Science and truth therein will forever remain to be discerned and demonstrated.
The demonstration lost and found
Jesus demonstrated the power of Christian Science to heal mortal minds and bodies. But this power was lost sight of, and must again be spiritually discerned, taught, and demonstrated according to Christ’s command, with “signs following.” Its Science must be apprehended by as many as believe on Christ and spiritually understand Truth.
Mystical antagonists
No analogy exists between the vague hypotheses of agnosticism, pantheism, theosophy, spiritualism, or millenarianism and the demonstrable truths of Christian Science; and I find the will, or sensuous reason of the human mind, to be opposed to the divine Mind as expressed through divine Science.
Optical illustration of Science
Christian Science is natural, but not physical. The Science of God and man is no more supernatural than is the science of numbers, though departing from the realm of the physical, as the Science of God, Spirit, must, some may deny its right to the name of Science. The Principle of divine metaphysics is God; the practice of divine metaphysics is the utilization of the power of Truth over error; its rules demonstrate its Science. Divine metaphysics reverses perverted and physical hypotheses as to Deity, even as the explanation of optics rejects the incidental or inverted image and shows what this inverted image is meant to represent.
Pertinent proposal
A prize of one hundred pounds, offered in Oxford University, England, for the best essay on Natural Science, – an essay calculated to offset the tendency of the age to attribute physical effects to physical causes rather than to a final spiritual cause,–is one of many incidents which show that Christian Science meets a yearning of the human race for spirituality.
Confirmatory tests
After a lengthy examination of my discovery and its demonstration in healing the sick, this fact became evident to me,–that Mind governs the body, not partially but wholly. I submitted my metaphysical system of treating disease to the broadest practical tests. Since then this system has gradually gained ground, and has proved itself, whenever scientifically employed, to be the most effective curative agent in medical practice.
One school of Truth
Is there more than one school of Christian Science? Christian Science is demonstrable. There can, therefore, be but one method in its teaching. Those who depart from this method forfeit their claims to belong to its school, and they become adherents of the Socratic, the Platonic, the Spencerian, or some other school. By this is meant that they adopt and adhere to some particular system of human opinions. Although these opinions may have occasional gleams of divinity, borrowed from that truly divine Science which eschews man-made systems, they nevertheless remain wholly human in their origin and tendency and are not scientifically Christian.
Unchanging Principle
From the infinite One in Christian Science comes one Principle and its infinite idea, and with this infinitude come spiritual rules, laws, and their demonstration, which, like the great Giver, are “the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever;” for thus are the divine Principle of healing and the Christ-idea characterized in the epistle to the Hebrews.
On sandy foundations
Any theory of Christian Science, which departs from what has already been stated and proved to be true, affords no foundation upon which to establish a genuine school of this Science. Also, if any so-called new school claims to be Christian Science, and yet uses another author’s discoveries without giving that author proper credit, such a school is erroneous, for it inculcates a breach of that divine commandment in the Hebrew Decalogue, “Thou shalt not steal.”
Principle and practice
God is the Principle of divine metaphysics. As there is but one God, there can be but one divine Principle of all Science; and there must be fixed rules for the demonstration of this divine Principle. The letter of Science plentifully reaches humanity to-day, but its spirit comes only in small degrees. The vital part, the heart and soul of Christian Science, is Love. Without this, the letter is but the dead body of Science, pulseless, cold, inanimate.
Reversible propositions
The fundamental propositions of divine metaphysics are summarized in the four following, to me, self-evident propositions. Even if reversed, these propositions will be found to agree in statement and proof, showing mathematically their exact relation to Truth. De Quincey says mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.
- God is All-in-all.
2. God is good. Good is Mind.
3. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter.
4. Life, God, omnipotent good, deny death, evil, sin, disease. – Disease, sin, evil, death, deny good, omnipotent God, Life.
Which of the denials in proposition four is true? Both are not, cannot be, true. According to the Scripture, I find that God is true, “but every [mortal] man a liar.”
Metaphysical inversions
The divine metaphysics of Christian Science, like the method in mathematics, proves the rule by inversion. For example: There is no pain in Truth, and no truth in pain; no nerve in Mind, and no mind in nerve; no matter in Mind, and no mind in matter; no matter in Life, and no life in matter; no matter in good, and no good in matter.
Definition of mortal mind
Usage classes both evil and good together as mind; therefore, to be understood, the author calls sick and sinful humanity mortal mind,–meaning by this term the flesh opposed to Spirit, the human mind and evil in contradistinction to the divine Mind, or Truth and good. The spiritually unscientific definition of mind is based on the evidence of the physical senses, which makes minds many and calls mind both human and divine.
In Science, Mind is one, including noumenon and phenomena, God and His thoughts.
Imperfect terminology
Mortal mind is a solecism in language, and involves an improper use of the word mind. As Mind is immortal, the phrase mortal mind implies something untrue and therefore unreal; and as the phrase is used in teaching Christian Science, it is meant to designate that which has no real existence. Indeed, if a better word or phrase could be suggested, it would be used; but in expressing the new tongue we must sometimes recur to the old and imperfect, and the new wine of the Spirit has to be poured into the old bottles of the letter.
Causation mental
Christian Science explains all cause and effect as mental, not physical. It lifts the veil of mystery from Soul and body. It shows the scientific relation of man to God, disentangles the interlaced ambiguities of being, and sets free the imprisoned thought. In divine Science, the universe, including man, is spiritual, harmonious, and eternal. Science shows that what is termed matter is but the subjective state of what is termed by the author mortal mind.
Philological inadequacy
Apart from the usual opposition to everything new, the one great obstacle to the reception of that spirituality, through which the understanding of Mind-science comes, is the inadequacy of material terms for metaphysical statements, and the consequent difficulty of so expressing metaphysical ideas as to make them comprehensible to any reader, who has not personally demonstrated Christian Science as brought forth in my discovery. Job says: “The ear trieth words, as the mouth tasteth meat.” The great difficulty is to give the right impression, when translating material terms back into the original spiritual tongue.
SCIENTIFIC TRANSLATION OF IMMORTAL MIND
Divine synonyms
GOD: Divine Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Mind.
Divine image
MAN: God’s spiritual idea, individual, perfect, eternal.
Divine reflection
IDEA: An image in Mind; the immediate object of understanding.–Webster.
SCIENTIFIC TRANSLATION OF MORTAL MIND
First Degree: Depravity.
Unreality
PHYSICAL. Evil beliefs, passions and appetites, fear, depraved will, self-justification, pride, envy, deceit, hatred, revenge, sin, sickness, disease, death.
Second Degree: Evil beliefs disappearing.
Transitional qualities
MORAL. Humanity, honesty, affection, compassion, hope, faith, meekness, temperance.
Third Degree: Understanding.
Reality
SPIRITUAL. Wisdom, purity, spiritual understanding, spiritual power, love, health, holiness.
Spiritual universe
In the third degree mortal mind disappears, and man as God’s image appears. Science so reverses the evidence before the corporeal human senses, as to make this Scriptural testimony true in our hearts, “The last shall be first, and the first last,” so that God and His idea may be to us what divinity really is and must of necessity be,–all-inclusive.
Aim of Science
A correct view of Christian Science and of its adaptation to healing includes vastly more than is at first seen. Works on metaphysics leave the grand point untouched. They never crown the power of Mind as the Messiah, nor do they carry the day against physical enemies,–even to the extinction of all belief in matter, evil, disease, and death,–nor insist upon the fact that God is all, therefore that matter is nothing beyond an image in mortal mind.
Divine personality
Christian Science strongly emphasizes the thought that God is not corporeal, but incorporeal,–that is, bodiless. Mortals are corporeal, but God is incorporeal.
As the words person and personal are commonly and ignorantly employed, they often lead, when applied to Deity, to confused and erroneous conceptions of divinity and its distinction from humanity. If the term personality, as applied to God, means infinite personality, then God is infinite Person,–in the sense of infinite personality, but not in the lower sense. An infinite Mind in a finite form is an absolute impossibility.
The term individuality is also open to objections, because an individual may be one of a series, one of many, as an individual man, an individual horse; whereas God is One,–not one of a series, but one alone and without an equal.
Spiritual language
God is Spirit; therefore the language of Spirit must be, and is, spiritual. Christian Science attaches no physical nature and significance to the Supreme Being or His manifestation; mortals alone do this. God’s essential language is spoken of in the last chapter of Mark’s Gospel as the new tongue, the spiritual meaning of which is attained through “signs following.”
The miracles of Jesus
Ear hath not heard, nor hath lip spoken, the pure language of Spirit. Our Master taught spirituality by similitudes and parables. As a divine student he unfolded God to man, illustrating and demonstrating Life and Truth in himself and by his power over the sick and sinning. Human theories are inadequate to interpret the divine Principle involved in the miracles (marvels) wrought by Jesus and especially in his mighty, crowning, unparalleled, and triumphant exit from the flesh.
Opacity of the senses
Evidence drawn from the five physical senses relates solely to human reason; and because of opacity to the true light, human reason dimly reflects and feebly transmits Jesus’ works and words. Truth is a revelation.
Leaven of Truth
Jesus bade his disciples beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees, which he defined as human doctrines. His parable of the “leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened,” impels the inference that the spiritual leaven signifies the Science of Christ and its spiritual interpretation,–an inference far above the merely ecclesiastical and formal applications of the illustration.
Did not this parable point a moral with a prophecy, foretelling the second appearing in the flesh of the Christ, Truth, hidden in sacred secrecy from the visible world?
Ages pass, but this leaven of Truth is ever at work. It must destroy the entire mass of error, and so be eternally glorified in man’s spiritual freedom.
The divine and human contrasted
In their spiritual significance, Science, Theology, and Medicine are means of divine thought, which include spiritual laws emanating from the invisible and infinite power and grace. The parable may import that these spiritual laws, perverted by a perverse material sense of law, are metaphysically presented as three measures of meal,–that is, three modes of mortal thought. In all mortal forms of thought, dust is dignified as the natural status of men and things, and modes of material motion are honored with the name of laws. This continues until the leaven of Spirit changes the whole of mortal thought, as yeast changes the chemical properties of meal.
Certain contradictions
The definitions of material law, as given by natural science, represent a kingdom necessarily divided against itself, because these definitions portray law as physical, not spiritual. Therefore they contradict the divine decrees and violate the law of Love, in which nature and God are one and the natural order of heaven comes down to earth.
Unescapable dilemma
When we endow matter with vague spiritual power, that is, when we do so in our theories, for of course we cannot really endow matter with what it does not and cannot possess, – we disown the Almighty, for such theories lead to one of two things. They either presuppose the self-evolution and self-government of matter, or else they assume that matter is the product of Spirit. To seize the first horn of this dilemma and consider matter as a power in and of itself, is to leave the creator out of His own universe; while to grasp the other horn of the dilemma and regard God as the creator of matter, is not only to make Him responsible for all disasters, physical and moral, but to announce Him as their source, thereby making Him guilty of maintaining perpetual misrule in the form and under the name of natural law.
God and nature
In one sense God is identical with nature, but this nature is spiritual and is not expressed in matter. The lawgiver, whose lightning palsies or prostrates in death the child at prayer, is not the divine ideal of omnipresent Love. God is natural good, and is represented only by the idea of goodness; while evil should be regarded as unnatural, because it is opposed to the nature of Spirit, God.
The sun and Soul
In viewing the sunrise, one finds that it contradicts the evidence before the senses to believe that the earth is in motion and the sun at rest. As astronomy reverses the human perception of the movement of the solar system, so Christian Science reverses the seeming relation of Soul and body and makes body tributary to Mind. Thus it is with man, who 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 or mind in matter, and that man is included in non-intelligence. Soul, or Spirit, is God, unchangeable and eternal; and man coexists with and reflects Soul, God, for man is God’s image.
Reversal of testimony
Science reverses the false testimony of the physical senses, and by this reversal mortals arrive at the fundamental facts of being. Then the question inevitably arises: Is a man sick if the material senses indicate that he is in good health? No! for matter can make no conditions for man. And is he well if the senses say he is sick? Yes, he is well in Science in which health is normal and disease is abnormal.
Health and the senses
Health is not a condition of matter, but of Mind; nor can the material senses bear reliable testimony on the subject of health. The Science of Mind-healing shows it to be impossible for aught but Mind to testify truly or to exhibit the real status of man. Therefore the divine Principle of Science, reversing the testimony of the physical senses, reveals man as harmoniously existent in Truth, which is the only basis of health; and thus Science denies all disease, heals the sick, overthrows false evidence, and refutes materialistic logic.
Any conclusion pro or con, deduced from supposed sensation in matter or from matter’s supposed consciousness of health or disease, instead of reversing the testimony of the physical senses, confirms that testimony as legitimate and so leads to disease.
Historic illustrations
When Columbus gave freer breath to the globe, ignorance and superstition chained the limbs of the brave old navigator, and disgrace and star vation stared him in the face; but sterner still would have been his fate, if his discovery had undermined the favorite inclinations of a sensuous philosophy.
Copernicus mapped out the stellar system, and before he spake, astrography was chaotic, and the heavenly fields were incorrectly explored.
Perennial beauty
The Chaldean Wisemen read in the stars the fate of empires and the fortunes of men. Though no higher revelation than the horoscope was to them displayed upon the empyrean, earth and heaven were bright, and bird and blossom were glad in God’s perennial and happy sunshine, golden with Truth. So we have goodness and beauty to gladden the heart; but man, left to the hypotheses of material sense unexplained by Science, is as the wandering comet or the desolate star–“a weary searcher for a viewless home.”
Astronomic unfoldings
The earth’s diurnal rotation is invisible to the physical eye, and the sun seems to move from east to west, instead of the earth from west to east. Until rebuked by clearer views of the everlasting facts, this false testimony of the eye deluded the judgment and induced false conclusions. Science shows appearances often to be erroneous, and corrects these errors by the simple rule that the greater controls the lesser. The sun is the central stillness, so far as our solar system is concerned, and the earth revolves about the sun once a year, besides turning daily on its own axis.
As thus indicated, astronomical order imitates the action of divine Principle; and the universe, the reflection of God, is thus brought nearer the spiritual fact, and is allied to divine Science as displayed in the everlasting government of the universe.
Opposing testimony
The evidence of the physical senses often reverses the real Science of being, and so creates a reign of discord, assigning seeming power to sin, sickness, and death; but the great facts of Life, rightly understood, defeat this triad of errors, contradict their false witnesses, and reveal the kingdom of heaven,–the actual reign of harmony on earth. The material senses’ reversal of the Science of Soul was practically exposed nineteen hundred years ago by the demonstrations of Jesus; yet these so-called senses still make mortal mind tributary to mortal body, and ordain certain sections of matter, such as brain and nerves, as the seats of pain and pleasure, from which matter reports to this so-called mind its status of happiness or misery.
Testimony of the senses
The optical focus is another proof of the illusion of material sense. On the eye’s retina, sky and tree-tops apparently join hands, clouds and ocean meet and mingle. The barometer,–that little prophet of storm and sunshine, denying the testimony of the senses,–points to fair weather in the midst of murky clouds and drenching rain. Experience is full of instances of similar illusions, which every thinker can recall for himself.
Spiritual sense of life
To material sense, the severance of the jugular vein takes away life; but to spiritual sense and in Science, Life goes on unchanged and being is eternal. Temporal life is a false sense of existence.
Ptolemaic and psychical error
Our theories make the same mistake regarding Soul and body that Ptolemy made regarding the solar system. They insist that soul is in body and mind therefore tributary to matter. Astronomical science has destroyed the false theory as to the relations of the celestial bodies, and Christian Science will surely destroy the greater error as to our terrestrial bodies. The true idea and Principle of man will then appear. The Ptolemaic blunder could not affect the harmony of being as does the error relating to soul and body, which reverses the order of Science and assigns to matter the power and prerogative of Spirit, so that man becomes the most absolutely weak and inharmonious creature in the universe.
Seeming and being
The verity of Mind shows conclusively how it is that matter seems 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.
The term CHRISTIAN SCIENCE was introduced by the author to designate the scientific system of divine healing.
The revelation consists of two parts:
- The discovery of this divine Science of Mindhealing, through a spiritual sense of the Scriptures and through the teachings of the Comforter, as promised by the Master.
- The proof, by present demonstration, that the socalled miracles of Jesus did not specially belong to a dispensation now ended, but that they illustrated an ever-operative divine Principle. The operation of this Principle indicates the eternality of the scientific order and continuity of being.
Scientific basis
Christian Science differs from material science, but not on that account is it less scientific. On the contrary, Christian Science is pre-eminently scientific, being based on Truth, the Principle of all science.
Physical science a blind belief
Physical science (so-called) is human knowledge,–a law of mortal mind, a blind belief, a Samson shorn of his strength. When this human belief lacks organizations to support it, its foundations are gone. Having neither moral might, spiritual basis, nor holy Principle of its own, this belief mistakes effect for cause and seeks to find life and intelligence in matter, thus limiting Life and holding fast to discord and death. In a word, human belief is a blind conclusion from material reasoning. This is a mortal, finite sense of things, which immortal Spirit silences forever.
Right interpretation
The universe, like man, is to be interpreted by Science from its divine Principle, God, and then it can be understood; but when explained on the basis of physical sense and represented as subject to growth, maturity, and decay, the universe, like man, is, and must continue to be, an enigma.
All force mental
Adhesion, cohesion, and attraction are properties of Mind. They belong to divine Principle, and support the equipoise of that thought-force, which launched the earth in its orbit and said to the proud wave, “Thus far and no farther.”
Spirit is the life, substance, and continuity of all things. We tread on forces. Withdraw them, and creation must collapse. Human knowledge calls them forces of matter; but divine Science declares that they belong wholly to divine Mind, are inherent in this Mind, and so restores them to their rightful home and classification.
Corporeal changes
The elements and functions of the physical body and of the physical world will change as mortal mind changes its beliefs. What is now considered the best condition for organic and functional health in the human body may no longer be found indispensable to health. Moral conditions will be found always harmonious and health-giving. Neither organic inaction nor overaction is beyond God’s control; and man will be found normal and natural to changed mortal thought, and therefore more harmonious in his manifestations than he was in the prior states which human belief created and sanctioned.
As human thought changes from one stage to another of conscious pain and painlessness, sorrow and joy, – from fear to hope and from faith to understanding, – the visible manifestation will at last be man governed by Soul, not by material sense. Reflecting God’s government, man is self-governed. When subordinate to the divine Spirit, man cannot be controlled by sin or death, thus proving our material theories about laws of health to be valueless.
The time and tide
The seasons will come and go with changes of time and tide, cold and heat, latitude and longitude. The agriculturist will find that these changes cannot affect his crops. “As a vesture shalt Thou change them and they shall be changed.” The mariner will have dominion over the atmosphere and the great deep, over the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air. The astronomer will no longer look up to the stars, he will look out from them upon the universe; and the florist will find his flower before its seed.
Mortal nothingness
Thus matter will finally be proved nothing more than a mortal belief, wholly inadequate to affect a man through its supposed organic action or supposed existence. Error will be no longer used in stating truth. The problem of nothingness, or “dust to dust,” will be solved, and mortal mind will be without form and void, for mortality will cease when man beholds himself God’s reflection, even as man sees his reflection in a glass.
A lack of originality
All Science is divine. Human thought never projected the least portion of true being. Human belief has sought and interpreted in its own way the echo of Spirit, and so seems to have reversed it and repeated it materially; but the human mind never produced a real tone nor sent forth a positive sound.
Antagonistic questions
The point at issue between Christian Science on the one hand and popular theology on the other is this: Shall Science explain cause and effect as being both natural and spiritual? Or shall all that is beyond the cognizance of the material senses be called supernatural, and be left to the mercy of speculative hypotheses?
Biblical basis
I have set forth Christian Science and its application to the treatment of disease just as I have discovered them. I have demonstrated through Mind the effects of Truth on the health, longevity, and morals of men; and I have found nothing in ancient or in modern systems on which to found my own, except the teachings and demonstrations of our great Master and the lives of prophets and apostles. The Bible has been my only authority. I have had no other guide in “the straight and narrow way” of Truth.
Science and Christianity
If Christendom resists the author’s application of the word Science to Christianity, or questions her use of the word Science, she will not therefore lose faith in Christianity, nor will Christianity lose its hold upon her. If God, the All-in-all, be the creator of the spiritual universe, including man, then everything entitled to a classification as truth, or Science, must be comprised in a knowledge or understanding of God, for there can be nothing beyond illimitable divinity.
Scientific terms
The terms Divine Science, Spiritual Science, Christ Science or Christian Science, or Science alone, she employs interchangeably, according to the requirements of the context. These synonymous terms stand for everything relating to God, the infinite, supreme, eternal Mind. It may be said, however, that the term Christian Science relates especially to Science as applied to humanity. Christian Science reveals God, not as the author of sin, sickness, and death, but as divine Principle, Supreme Being, Mind, exempt from all evil. It teaches that matter is the falsity, not the fact, of existence; that nerves, brain, stomach, lungs, and so forth, have–as matter–no intelligence, life, nor sensation.
No physical science
There is no physical science, inasmuch as all truth proceeds from the divine Mind. Therefore truth is not human, and is not a law of matter, for matter is not a lawgiver. Science is an emanation of divine Mind, and is alone able to interpret God aright. It has a spiritual, and not a material origin. It is a divine utterance,–the Comforter which leadeth into all truth.
Christian Science eschews what is called natural science, in so far as this is built on the false hypotheses that matter is its own lawgiver, that law is founded on material conditions, and that these are final and overrule the might of divine Mind. Good is natural and primitive. It is not miraculous to itself.
Practical Science
The term Science, properly understood, refers only to the laws of God and to His government of the universe, inclusive of man. From this it follows that business men and cultured scholars have found that Christian Science enhances their endurance and mental powers, enlarges their perception of character, gives them acuteness and comprehensiveness and an ability to exceed their ordinary capacity. The human mind, imbued with this spiritual understanding, becomes more elastic, is capable of greater endurance, escapes somewhat from itself, and requires less repose. A knowledge of the Science of being develops the latent abilities and possibilities of man. It extends the atmosphere of thought, giving mortals access to broader and higher realms. It raises the thinker into his native air of insight and perspicacity.
An odor becomes beneficent and agreeable only in proportion to its escape into the surrounding atmosphere. So it is with our knowledge of Truth. If one would not quarrel with his fellow-man for waking him from a cataleptic nightmare, he should not resist Truth, which banishes – yea, forever destroys with the higher testimony of Spirit–the so-called evidence of matter.
Mathematics and scientific logic
Science relates to Mind, not matter. It rests on fixed Principle and not upon the judgment of false sensation. The addition of two sums in mathematics must always bring the same result. So is it with logic. If both the major and the minor propositions of a syllogism are correct, the conclusion, if properly drawn, cannot be false. So in Christian Science there are no discords nor contradictions, because its logic is as harmonious as the reasoning of an accurately stated syllogism or of a properly computed sum in arithmetic. Truth is ever truthful, and can tolerate no error in premise or conclusion.
Truth by inversion
If you wish to know the spiritual fact, you can discover it by reversing the material fable, be the fable pro or con,–be it in accord with your preconceptions or utterly contrary to them.
Antagonistic theories
Pantheism may be defined as a belief in the intelligence of matter,–a belief which Science overthrows. In those days there will be “great tribulation such as was not since the beginning of the world;” and earth will echo the cry, “Art thou [Truth] come hither to torment us before the time?” Animal magnetism, hypnotism, spiritualism, theosophy, agnosticism, pantheism, and infidelity are antagonistic to true being and fatal to its demonstration; and so are some other systems.
Ontology needed
We must abandon pharmaceutics, and take up ontology,–“the science of real being.” We must look deep into realism instead of accepting only the outward sense of things. Can we gather peaches from a pine-tree, or learn from discord the concord of being? Yet quite as rational are some of the leading illusions along the path which Science must tread in its reformatory mission among mortals. The very name, illusion, points to nothingness.
Reluctant guests
The generous liver may object to the author’s small estimate of the pleasures of the table. The sinner sees, in the system taught in this book, that the demands of
God must be met. The petty intellect is alarmed by constant appeals to Mind. The licentious disposition is discouraged over its slight spiritual prospects. When all men are bidden to the feast, the excuses come. One has a farm, another has merchandise, and therefore they cannot accept.
Excuses for ignorance
It is vain to speak dishonestly of divine Science, which destroys all discord, when you can demonstrate the actuality of Science. It is unwise to doubt if reality is in perfect harmony with God, divine Principle, – if Science, when understood and demonstrated, will destroy all discord, – since you admit that God is omnipotent; for from this premise it follows that good and its sweet concords have all-power.
Children and adults
Christian Science, properly understood, would disabuse the human mind of material beliefs which war against spiritual facts; and these material beliefs must be denied and cast out to make place for truth. You cannot add to the contents of a vessel already full. Laboring long to shake the adult’s faith in matter and to inculcate a grain of faith in God, an inkling of the ability of Spirit to make the body harmonious,–the author has often remembered our Master’s love for little children, and understood how truly such as they belong to the heavenly kingdom.
All evil unnatural
If thought is startled at the strong claim of Science for the supremacy of God, or Truth, and doubts the supremacy of good, ought we not, contrariwise, to be astounded at the vigorous claims of evil and doubt them, and no longer think it natural to love sin and unnatural to forsake it,–no longer imagine evil to be ever-present and good absent? Truth should not seem so surprising and unnatural as error, and error should not seem so real as truth. Sickness should not seem so real as health. There is no error in Science, and our lives must be governed by reality in order to be in harmony with God, the divine Principle of all being.
The error of carnality
When once destroyed by divine Science, the false evidence before the corporeal senses disappears. Hence the opposition of sensuous man to the Science of Soul and the significance of the Scripture, “The carnal mind is enmity against God.” The central fact of the Bible is the superiority of spiritual over physical power.
THEOLOGY
Churchly neglect
Must Christian Science come through the Christian churches as some persons insist? This Science has come already, after the manner of God’s appointing, but the churches seem not ready to receive it, according to the Scriptural saying, “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” Jesus once said: “I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight.” As aforetime, the spirit of the Christ, which taketh away the ceremonies and doctrines of men, is not accepted until the hearts of men are made ready for it.
John the Baptist, and the Messiah
The mission of Jesus confirmed prophecy, and explained the so-called miracles of olden time as natural demonstrations of the divine power, demonstra- , tions which were not understood. Jesus’ works established his claim to the Messiahship. In reply to John’s inquiry, “Art thou he that should come,”
Jesus returned an affirmative reply, recounting his works instead of referring to his doctrine, confident that this exhibition of the divine power to heal would fully answer the question. Hence his reply: “Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.” In other words, he gave his benediction to any one who should not deny that such effects, coming from divine Mind, prove the unity of God,–the divine principle which brings out all harmony.
Christ rejected
The Pharisees of old thrust the spiritual idea and the man who lived it out of their synagogues, and retained their materialistic beliefs about God. Jesus’ system of healing received no aid nor approval from other sanitary or religious systems, from doctrines of physics or of divinity; and it has not yet been generally accepted. To-day, as of yore, unconscious of the reappearing of the spiritual idea, blind belief shuts the door upon it, and condemns the cure of the sick and sinning if it is wrought on any but a material and a doctrinal theory. Anticipating this rejection of idealism, 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 the earth?”
John’s misgivings
Did the doctrines of John the Baptist confer healing power upon him, or endow him with the truest conception of the Christ? This righteous preacher once pointed his disciples to Jesus as “the Lamb of God;” yet afterwards he seriously questioned the signs of the Messianic appearing, and sent the inquiry to Jesus, “Art thou he that should come?”
Faith according to works
Was John’s faith greater than that of the Samaritan woman, who said, “Is not this the Christ?” There was also a certain centurion of whose faith Jesus himself declared, “I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.”
In Egypt, it was Mind which saved the Israelites from belief in the plagues. In the wilderness, streams flowed from the rock, and manna fell from the sky. The Israelites looked upon the brazen serpent, and straightway believed that they were healed of the poisonous stings of vipers. In national prosperity, miracles attended the successes of the Hebrews; but when they departed from the true idea, their demoralization began. Even in captivity among foreign nations, the divine Principle wrought wonders for the people of God in the fiery furnace and in kings’ palaces.
Judaism antipathetic
Judaism was the antithesis of Christianity, because Judaism engendered the limited form of a national or tribal religion. It was a finite and material system, carried out in special theories concerning God, man, sanitary methods, and a religious cultus. That he made “himself equal with God,” was one of the Jewish accusations against him who planted Christianity on the foundation of Spirit, who taught as he was inspired by the Father and would recognize no life, intelligence, nor substance outside of God.
Priestly learning
The Jewish conception of God, as Yawah, Jehovah, or only a mighty hero and king, has not quite given place to the true knowledge of God. Creeds and rituals have not cleansed their hands of rabbinical lore. To-day the cry of bygone ages is repeated, “Crucify him!” At every advancing step, truth is still opposed with sword and spear.
Testimony of martyrs
The word martyr, from the Greek, means witness; but those who testified for Truth were so often persecuted unto death, that at length the word martyr was narrowed in its significance and so has come always to mean one who suffers for his convictions. The new faith in the Christ, Truth, so roused the hatred of the opponents of Christianity, that the followers of Christ were burned, crucified, and otherwise persecuted; and so it came about that human rights were hallowed by the gallows and the cross.
Absence of Christ-power
Man-made doctrines are waning. They have not waxed strong in times of trouble. Devoid of the Christ-power, how can they illustrate the doctrines of Christ or the miracles of grace? Denial of the possibility of Christian healing robs Christianity of the very element, which gave it divine force and its astonishing and unequalled success in the first century.
Basis of miracles
The true Logos is demonstrably Christian Science, the natural law of harmony which overcomes discord,–not because this Science is supernatural or preternatural, nor because it is an infraction of divine law, but because it is the immutable law of God, good. Jesus said: “I knew that Thou hearest me always;” and he raised Lazarus from the dead, stilled the tempest, healed the sick, walked on the water. There is divine authority for believing in the superiority of spiritual power over material resistance.
Lawful wonders
A miracle fulfils God’s law, but does not violate that law. This fact at present seems more mysterious than the miracle itself. The Psalmist sang: “What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? Thou Jordan, that thou wast driven back? Ye mountains, that ye skipped like rams, and ye little hills, like lambs? Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob.” The miracle introduces no disorder, but unfolds the primal order, establishing the Science of God’s unchangeable law. Spiritual evolution alone is worthy of the exercise of divine power.
Fear and sickness identical
The same power which heals sin heals also sickness. This is “the beauty of holiness,” that when Truth heals the sick it casts out evils, and when Truth casts out the evil called disease, it heals the sick. When Christ cast out the devil of dumbness, “it came to pass, when the devil was gone out, the dumb spake.” There is to-day danger of repeating the offence of the Jews by limiting the Holy One of Israel and asking: “Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?” What cannot God do?
The unity of Science and Christianity
It has been said, and truly, that Christianity must be Science, and Science must be Christianity, else one or the other is false and useless; but neither is unimportant or untrue, and they are alike in demonstration. This proves the one to be identical with the other. Christianity as Jesus taught it was not a creed, nor a system of ceremonies, nor a special gift from a ritualistic Jehovah; but it was the demonstration of divine Love casting out error and healing the sick, not merely in the name of Christ, or Truth, but in demonstration of Truth, as must be the case in the cycles of divine light.
The Christ-mission
Jesus established his church and maintained his mission on a spiritual foundation of Christ-healing. He taught his followers that his religion had a divine Principle, which would cast out error and heal both the sick and the sinning. He claimed no intelligence, action, nor life separate from God. Despite the persecution this brought upon him, he used his divine power to save men both bodily and spiritually.
Ancient spiritualism
The question then as now was, How did Jesus heal the sick? His answer to this question the world rejected. He appealed to his students: “Whom do men say that I, the Son of man, am?” That is: Who or what is it that is thus identified with casting out evils and healing the sick? They replied, “Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.” These prophets were considered dead, and this reply may indicate that some of the people believed that Jesus was a medium, controlled by the spirit of John or of Elias.
This ghostly fancy was repeated by Herod himself. That a wicked king and debauched husband should have no high appreciation of divine Science and the great work of the Master, was not surprising; for how could such a sinner comprehend what the disciples did not fully understand? But even Herod doubted if Jesus was controlled by the sainted preacher. Hence Herod’s assertion: “John have I beheaded: but who is this?” No wonder Herod desired to see the new Teacher.
Doubting disciples
The disciples apprehended their Master better than did others; but they did not comprehend all that he said and did, or they would not have questioned him so often. Jesus patiently persisted in teaching and demonstrating the truth of being. His students saw this power of Truth heal the sick, cast out evil, raise the dead; but the ultimate of this wonderful work was not spiritually discerned, even by them, until after the crucifixion, when their immaculate Teacher stood before them, the victor over sickness, sin, disease, death, and the grave.
Yearning to be understood, the Master repeated, “But whom say ye that I am?” This renewed inquiry meant: Who or what is it that is able to do the work, so mysterious to the popular mind? In his rejection of the answer already given and his renewal of the question, it is plain that Jesus completely eschewed the narrow opinion implied in their citation of the common report about him.
A divine response
With his usual impetuosity, Simon replied for his brethren, and his reply set forth a great fact: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!” That is: The Messiah is what thou hast declared,–Christ, the spirit of God, of Truth, Life, and Love, which heals mentally. This assertion elicited from Jesus the benediction, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven;” that is, Love hath shown thee the way of Life!
The true and living rock
Before this the impetuous disciple had been called only by his common names, Simon Bar-jona, or son of Jona; but now the Master gave him a spiritual name in these words: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter; and upon this rock [the meaning of the Greek word petros, or stone] I will build my church; and the gates of hell [hades, the underworld, or the grave] shall not prevail against it.” In other words, Jesus purposed founding his society, not on the personal Peter as a mortal, but on the Godpower which lay behind Peter’s confession of the true Messiah.
Sublime summary
It was now evident to Peter that divine Life, Truth, and Love, and not a human personality, was the healer of the sick and a rock, a firm foundation in the realm of harmony. On this spiritually scientific basis Jesus explained his cures, which appeared miraculous to outsiders. He showed that diseases were cast out neither by corporeality, by materia medica, nor by hygiene, but by the divine Spirit, casting out the errors of mortal mind. The supremacy of Spirit was the foundation on which Jesus built. His sublime summary points to the religion of Love.
New era in Jesus
Jesus established in the Christian era the precedent for all Christianity, theology, and healing. Christians are under as direct orders now, as they were then, to be Christlike, to possess the Christ-spirit, to follow the Christ-example, and to heal the sick as well as the sinning. It is easier for Christianity to cast out sickness than sin, for the sick are more willing to part with pain than are sinners to give up the sinful, so-called pleasure of the senses. The Christian can prove this to-day as readily is it was proved centuries ago.
Healthful theology
Our Master said to every follower: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature! . . . Heal the sick! . . . Love thy neighbor as thyself!” It was this theology of Jesus which healed the sick and the sinning. It is his theology in this book and the spiritual meaning of this theology, which heals the sick and causes the wicked to “forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts.” It was our Master’s theology which the impious sought to destroy.
Marvels and reformations
From beginning to end, the Scriptures are full of accounts of the triumph of Spirit, Mind, over matter. Moses proved the power of Mind by what men called miracles ; so did Joshua, Elijah, and Elisha. The Christian era was ushered in with signs and wonders. Reforms have commonly been attended with bloodshed and persecution, even when the end has been brightness and peace; but the present new, yet old, reform in religious faith will teach men patiently and wisely to stem the tide of sectarian bitterness, whenever it flows inward.
Science obscured
The decisions by vote of Church Councils as to what should and should not be considered Holy Writ; the manifest mistakes in the ancient versions; 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 neither wholly obscure the divine Science of the Scriptures seen from Genesis to Revelation, mar the demonstration of Jesus, nor annul the healing by the prophets, who foresaw that “the stone which the builders rejected” would become “the head of the corner.”
Opponents benefited
Atheism, pantheism, theosophy, and agnosticism are opposed to Christian Science, as they are to ordinary religion; but it does not follow that the profane or atheistic invalid cannot be healed by Christian Science. The moral condition of such a man demands the remedy of Truth more than it is needed in most cases; and Science is more than usually effectual in the treatment of moral ailments.
God invisible to the senses
That God is a corporeal being, nobody can truly affirm. The Bible represents Him as saying: “Thou canst not see My face; for there shall no man see Me and live.” Not materially but spiritually we know Him as divine Mind, as Life, Truth, and Love. We shall obey and adore in proportion as we apprehend the divine nature and love Him understandingly, warring no more over the corporeality, but rejoicing in the affluence of our God. Religion will then be of the heart and not of the head. Mankind will no longer be tyrannical and proscriptive from lack of love,–straining out gnats and swallowing camels.
The true worship
We worship spiritually, only as we cease to worship materially. Spiritual devoutness is the soul of Christianity. Worshipping through the medium of matter is paganism. Judaic and other rituals are but types and shadows of true worship. “The true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”
Anthropomorphism
The Jewish tribal Jehovah was a man-projected God, liable to wrath, repentance, and human changeableness. The Christian Science God is universal, eternal, divine love, which changeth not and causeth no evil, disease, nor death. It is indeed mournfully true that the older Scripture is reversed. In the begining God created man in His, God’s, image; but mortals would procreate man, and make God in their own human image. What is the god of a mortal, but a mortal magnified?
More than profession required
This indicates the distance between the theological and ritualistic religion of the ages and the truth preached by Jesus. More than profession is requisite for Christian demonstration. Few understand or adhere to Jesus’ divine precepts for living and healing. Why? Because his precepts require the disciple to cut off the right hand and pluck out the right eye, – that is, to set aside even the most cherished beliefs and practices, to leave all for Christ.
No ecclesiastical monopoly
All revelation (such is the popular thought!) must come from the schools and along the line of scholarly and ecclesiastical descent, as kings are crowned from a royal dynasty. In healing the sick and sinning, Jesus elaborated the fact that the healing effect followed the understanding of the divine Principle and of the Christ-spirit which governed the corporeal Jesus. For this Principle there is no dynasty, no ecclesiastical monopoly. Its only crowned head is immortal sovereignty. Its only priest is the spiritualized man. The Bible declares that all believers are made “kings and priests unto God.” The outsiders did not then, and do not now, understand this ruling of the Christ; therefore they cannot demonstrate God’s healing power. Neither can this manifestation of Christ be comprehended, until its divine Principle is scientifically understood.
A change demanded
The adoption of scientific religion and of divine healing will ameliorate sin, sickness, and death. Let our pulpits do justice to Christian Science. Let it have fair representation by the press. Give to it the place in our institutions of learning now occupied by scholastic theology and physiology, and it will eradicate sickness and sin in less time than the old systems, devised for subduing them, have required for self-establishment and propagation.
Two claims omitted
Anciently the followers of Christ, or Truth, measured Christianity by its power over sickness, sin, and death; but modern religions generally omit all but one of these powers,–the power over sin. We must seek the undivided garment, the whole Christ, as our first proof of Christianity, for Christ, Truth, alone can furnish us with absolute evidence.
Selfishness and loss
If the soft palm, upturned to a lordly salary, and architectural skill, making dome and spire tremulous with beauty, turn the poor and the stranger from the gate, they at the same time shut the door on progress. In vain do the manger and the cross tell their story to pride and fustian. Sensuality palsies the right hand, and causes the left to let go its grasp on the divine.
Temple cleansed
As in Jesus’ time, so to-day, tyranny and pride need to be whipped out of the temple, and humility and divine Science to be welcomed in. The strong cords of scientific demonstration, as twisted and wielded by Jesus, are still needed to purge the temples of their vain traffic in worldly worship and to make them meet dwelling-places for the Most High.
MEDICINE
Question of precedence
Which was first, Mind or medicine? If Mind was first and self-existent, then Mind, not matter, must have been the first medicine. God being All-inall, He made medicine; but that medicine was Mind. It could not have been matter, which departs from the nature and character of Mind, God. Truth is God’s remedy for error of every kind, and Truth destroys only what is untrue. Hence the fact that, to-day, as yesterday, Christ casts out evils and heals the sick.
Methods rejected
It is plain that God does not employ drugs or hygiene, nor provide them for human use; else Jesus would have recommended and employed them in his healing. The sick are more deplorably lost than the sinning, if the sick cannot rely on God for help and the sinning can. The divine Mind never called matter medicine, and matter required a material and human belief before it could be considered as medicine.
Error not curative
Sometimes the human mind uses one error to medicine another. Driven to choose between two difficulties, the human mind takes the lesser to relieve the greater. On this basis it saves from starvation by theft, and quiets pain with anodynes. You admit that mind influences the body somewhat, but you conclude that the stomach, blood, nerves, bones, etc., hold the preponderance of power. Controlled by this belief, you continue in the old routine. You lean on the inert and unintelligent, never discerning how this deprives you of the available superiority of divine Mind. The body is not controlled scientifically by a negative mind.
Impossible coalescence
Mind is the grand creator, and there can be no power except that which is derived from Mind. If Mind was first chronologically, is first potentially, and must be first eternally, then give to Mind the glory, honor, dominion, and power everlastingly due its holy name. Inferior and unspiritual methods of healing may try to make Mind and drugs coalesce, but the two will not mingle scientifically. Why should we wish to make them do so, since no good can come of it?
If Mind is foremost and superior, let us rely upon Mind, which needs no cooperation from lower powers, even if these so-called powers are real.
Naught is the squire, when the king is nigh; Withdraws the star, when dawns the sun’s brave light.
Soul and sense
The various mortal beliefs formulated in human philosophy, physiology, hygiene, are mainly predicated of matter, and afford faint gleams of God, or Truth. The more material a belief, the more obstinately tenacious its error; the stronger are the manifestations of the corporeal senses, the weaker the indications of Soul.
Will-power detrimental
Human will-power is not Science. Human will belongs to the so-called material senses, and its use is to be condemned. Willing the sick to recover is not the metaphysical practice of Christian Science, but is sheer animal magnetism. Human will-power may infringe the rights of man. It produces evil continually, and is not a factor in the realism of being. Truth, and not corporeal will, is the divine power which says to disease, “Peace, be still.”
Conservative antagonism
Because divine Science wars with so-called physical science, even as Truth wars with error, the old schools still oppose it. Ignorance, pride, or prejudice closes the door to whatever is not stereotyped. When the Science of being is universally understood, every man will be his own physician, and Truth will be the universal panacea.
Ancient healers
It is a question to-day, whether the ancient inspired healers understood the Science of Christian healing, or whether they caught its sweet tones, as the natural musician catches the tones of harmony, without being able to explain them. So divinely imbued were they with the spirit of Science, that the lack of the letter could not hinder their work; and that letter, without the spirit, would have made void their practice.
The struggle and victory
The struggle for the recovery of invalids goes on, not between material methods, but between mortal minds and immortal Mind. The victory will be on the patient’s side only as immortal Mind through Christ, Truth, subdues the human belief in disease. It matters not what material method one may adopt, whether faith in drugs, trust in hygiene, or reliance on some other minor curative.
Mystery of godliness
Scientific healing has this advantage over other methods,–that in it Truth controls error. From this fact arise its ethical as well as its physical effects. Indeed, its ethical and physical effects are indissolubly connected. If there is any mystery in Christian healing, it is the mystery which godliness always presents to the ungodly,–the mystery always arising from ignorance of the laws of eternal and unerring Mind.
Matter versus matter
Other methods undertake to oppose error with error, and thus they increase the antagonism of one form of matter towards other forms of matter or error, and the warfare between Spirit and the flesh goes on. By this antagonism mortal mind must continually weaken its own assumed power.
How healing was lost
The theology of Christian Science includes healing the sick. Our Master’s first article of faith propounded to his students was healing, and he proved his faith by his works. The ancient Christians were healers. Why has this element of Christianity been lost? Because 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. By trusting matter to destroy its own discord, health and harmony have been sacrificed. Such systems are barren of the vitality of spiritual power, by which material sense is made the servant of Science and religion becomes Christlike.
Drugs and divinity
Material medicine substitutes drugs for the power of God–even the might of Mind–to heal the body. Scholasticism clings for salvation to the person, instead of to the divine Principle, of the man Jesus; and his Science, the curative agent of God, is silenced. Why? Because truth divests material drugs of their imaginary power, and clothes Spirit with supremacy. Science is the “stranger that is within thy gates,” remembered not, even when its elevating effects practically prove its divine origin and efficacy.
Christian Science as old as God
Divine Science derives its sanction from the Bible, and the divine origin of Science is demonstrated through the holy influence of Truth in healing sickness and sin. This healing power of Truth must have been far anterior to the period in which Jesus lived. It is as ancient as “the Ancient of days.” It lives through all Life, and extends throughout all space.
Reduction to system
Divine metaphysics is now reduced to a system, to a form comprehensible by and adapted to the thought of the age in which we live. This system enables the learner to demonstrate the divine Principle, upon which Jesus’ healing was based, and the sacred rules for its present application to the cure of disease.
Late in the nineteenth century I demonstrated the divine rules of Christian Science. They were submitted to the broadest practical test, and everywhere, when honestly applied under circumstances where demonstration was humanly possible, this Science showed that Truth had lost none of its divine and healing efficacy, even though centuries had passed away since Jesus practised these rules on the hills of Judaea and in the valleys of Galilee.
Perusal and practice
Although this volume contains the complete Science of Mind-healing, never believe that you can absorb the whole meaning of the Science by a simple perusal of this book. The book needs to be studied, and the demonstration of the rules of scientific healing will plant you firmly on the spiritual groundwork of Christian Science. This proof lifts you high above the perishing fossils of theories already antiquated, and enables you to grasp the spiritual facts of being hitherto unattained and seemingly dim.
A definite rule discovered
Our Master healed the sick, practised Christian healing, and taught the generalities of its divine Principle to his students; but he left no definite rule for demonstrating this Principle of healing and preventing disease. This rule remained to be discovered in Christian Science. A pure affection takes form in goodness, but Science alone reveals the divine Principle of goodness and demonstrates its rules.
Jesus’ own practice
Jesus never spoke of disease as dangerous or as difficult to heal. When his students brought to him a case they had failed to heal, he said to them, “O faithless generation,” implying that the requisite power to heal was in Mind. He prescribed no drugs, urged no obedience to material laws, but acted in direct disobedience to them.
The man of anatomy and of theology
Neither anatomy nor theology has ever described man as created by Spirit, – as God’s man. The former explains the men of men, or the “children of men,” as created corporeally instead of spiritually and as emerging from the lowest, instead of from the highest, conception of being. Both anatomy and theology define man as both physical and mental, and place mind at the mercy of matter for every function, formation, and manifestation. Anatomy takes up man at all points materially. It loses Spirit, drops the true tone, and accepts the discord. Anatomy and theology reject the divine Principle which produces harmonious man, and deal–the one wholly, the other primarily – with matter, calling that man which is not the counterpart, but the counterfeit, of God’s man. Then theology tries to explain how to make this man a Christian,–how from this basis of division and discord to produce the concord and unity of Spirit and His likeness.
Physiology deficient
Physiology exalts matter, dethrones Mind, and claims to rule man by material law, instead of spiritual. When physiology fails to give health or life by this process, it ignores the divine Spirit as unable or unwilling to render help in time of physical need. When mortals sin, this ruling of the schools leaves them to the guidance of a theology which admits God to be the healer of sin but not of sickness, although our great
Master demonstrated that Truth could save from sickness as well as from sin.
Blunders and blunderers
Mind as far outweighs drugs in the cure of disease as in the cure of sin. The more excellent way is divine Science in every case. Is materia medica a science or a bundle of speculative human theories? The prescription which succeeds in one instance fails in another, and this is owing to the different mental states of the patient. These states are not comprehended and they are left without explanation except in Christian Science. The rule and its perfection of operation never vary in Science. If you fail to succeed in any case, it is because you have not demonstrated the life of Christ, Truth, more in your own life,–because you have not obeyed the rule and proved the Principle of divine Science.
Old-school physician
A physician of the old school remarked with great gravity: “We know that mind affects the body somewhat, and advise our patients to be hopeful and cheerful and to take as little medicine as possible; but mind can never cure organic difficulties.” The logic is lame, and facts contradict it. The author has cured what is termed organic disease as readily as she has cured purely functional disease, and with no power but the divine Mind.
Tests in our day
Since God, divine Mind, governs all, not partially but supremely, predicting disease does not dignify therapeutics. Whatever guides thought spiritually benefits mind and body. We need to understand the affirmations of divine Science, dismiss superstition, and demonstrate truth according to Christ. To-day there is hardly a city, village, or hamlet, in which are not to be found living witnesses and monuments to the virtue and power of Truth, as applied through this Christian system of healing disease.
The main purpose
To-day the healing power of Truth is widely demonstrated as an immanent, eternal Science, instead of a phenomenal exhibition. Its appearing is the coming anew of the gospel of “on earth peace, good-will toward men.” This coming, as was promised by the Master, is for its establishment as a permanent dispensation among men; but the mission of Christian Science now, as in the time of its earlier demonstration, is not primarily one of physical healing. Now, as then, signs and wonders are wrought in the metaphysical healing of physical disease; but these signs are only to demonstrate its divine origin,–to attest the reality of the higher mission of the Christ-power to take away the sins of the world.
Exploded doctrine
The science (so-called) of physics would have one believe that both matter and mind are subject to disease, and that, too, in spite of the individual’s protest and contrary to the law of divine Mind. This human view infringes man’s free moral agency; and it is as evidently erroneous to the author, and will be to all others at some future day, as the practically rejected doctrine of the predestination of souls to damnation or salvation. The doctrine that man’s harmony is governed by physical conditions all his earthly days, and that he is then thrust out of his own body by the operation of matter,–even the doctrine of the superiority of matter over Mind,–is fading out.
Disease mental
The hosts of AEsculapius are flooding the world with diseases, because they are ignorant that the human mind and body are myths. To be sure, they sometimes treat the sick as if there was but one factor in the case; but this one factor they represent to be body, not mind. Infinite Mind could not possibly create a remedy outside of itself, but erring, finite, human mind has an absolute need of something beyond itself for its redemption and healing.
Intentions respected
Great respect is due the motives and philanthropy of the higher class of physicians. We know that if they understood the Science of Mind-healing, and were in possession of the enlarged power it confers to benefit the race physically and spiritually, they would rejoice with us. Even this one reform in medicine would ultimately deliver mankind from the awful and oppressive bondage now enforced by false theories, from which multitudes would gladly escape.
Man governed by Mind
Mortal belief says that death has been occasioned by fright. Fear never stopped being and its action. The blood, heart, lungs, brain, etc., have nothing to do with Life, God. Every function of the real man is governed by the divine Mind. The human mind has no power to kill or to cure, and it has no comtrol over God’s man. The divine Mind that made man maintains His own image and likeness. The human mind is opposed to God and must be put off, as St. Paul declares. All that really exists is the divine Mind and its idea, and in this Mind the entire being is found harmonious and eternal. The straight and narrow way is to see and acknowledge this fact, yield to this power, and follow the leadings of truth.
Mortal mind dethroned
That mortal mind claims to govern every organ of the mortal body, we have overwhelming proof. But this so called mind is a myth, and must by its own consent yield to Truth. It would wield the sceptre of a monarch, but it is powerless. The immortal divine Mind takes away all its supposed sovereignty, and saves mortal mind from itself. The author has endeavored to make this book the AEsculapius of mind as well as of body, that it may give hope to the sick and heal them, although they know not how the work is done. Truth has a healing effect, even when not fully understood.
All activity from thought
Anatomy describes muscular action as produced by mind in one instance and not in another. Such errors beset every material theory, in which one statement contradicts another over and over again. It is related that Sir Humphry Davy once apparently cured a case of paralysis simply by introducing a thermometer into the patient’s mouth. This he did merely to ascertain the temperature of the patient’s body; but the sick man supposed this ceremony was intended to heal him, and he recovered accordingly. Such a fact illustrates our theories.
The author’s experiments in medicine
The author’s medical researches and experiments had prepared her thought for the metaphysics of Christian Science. Every material dependence had failed her in her search for truth; and she can now understand why, and can see the means by which mortals are divinely driven to a spiritual source for health and happiness.
Homoeopathic attenuations
Her experiments in homoeopathy had made her skeptical as to material curative methods. Jahr, from Aconitum to Zincum oxydatum, enumerates the general symptoms, the characteristic signs, which demand different remedies; but the drug is frequently attenuated to such a degree that not a vestige of it remains. Thus we learn that it is not the drug which expels the disease or changes one of the symptoms of disease.
Only salt and water
The author has attenuated Natrum muriaticum (common table-salt) until there was not a single saline property left. The salt had “lost his savour;” and yet, with one drop of that attenuation in a goblet of water, and a teaspoonful of the water administered at intervals of three hours, she has cured a patient sinking in the last stage of typhoid fever. The highest attenuation of homoeopathy and the most potent rises above matter into mind. This discovery leads to more light. From it may be learned that either human faith or the divine Mind is the healer and that there is no efficacy in a drug.
Origin of pain
You say a boil is painful; but that is impossible, for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests, through inflammation and swelling, a belief in pain, and this belief is called a boil. Now administer mentally to your patient a high attenuation of truth, and it will soon cure the boil. The fact that pain cannot exist where there is no mortal mind to feel it is a proof that this so-called mind makes its own pain–that is, its own belief in pain.
Source of contagion
We weep because others weep, we yawn because they yawn, and we have smallpox because others have it; but mortal mind, not matter, contains and carries the infection. When this mental contagion is understood, we shall be more careful of our mental conditions and we shall avoid loquacious tattling about disease, as we would avoid advocating crime. Neither sympathy nor society should ever tempt us to cherish error in any form, and certainly we should not be error’s advocate.
Disease arises, like other mental conditions, from association. Since it is a law of mortal mind that certain diseases should be regarded as contagious, this law obtains credit through association,–calling up the fear that creates the image of disease and its consequent manifestation in the body.
Imaginary cholera
This fact in metaphysics is illustrated by the following incident: A man was made to believe that he occupied a bed where a cholera patient had died. Immediately the symptoms of this disease appeared, and the man died. The fact was, that he had not caught the cholera by material contact, because no cholera patient had been in that bed.
Children’s ailments
If a child is exposed to contagion or infection, the mother is frightened and says, “My child will be sick.” The law of mortal mind and her own fears govern her child more than the child’s mind governs itself, and they produce the very results which might have been prevented through the opposite understanding. Then it is believed that exposure to the contagion wrought the mischief.
That mother is not a Christian Scientist, and her affections need better guidance, who says to her child: “You look sick,” “You look tired,” “You need rest,” or “You need medicine.”
Such a mother runs to her little one, who thinks she has hurt her face by falling on the carpet, and says, moaning more childishly than her child, “Mamma knows you are hurt.” The better and more successful method for any mother to adopt is to say: “Oh, never mind! You’re not hurt, so don’t think you are.” Presently the child forgets all about the accident, and is at play.
Drug-power mental
When the sick recover by the use of drugs, it is the law of a general belief, culminating in individual faith, which heals; and according to this faith will the effect be. Even when you take away the individual confidence in the drug, you have not yet divorced the drug from the general faith. The chemist, the botanist, the druggist, the doctor, and the nurse equip the medicine with their faith, and the beliefs which are in the majority rule. When the general belief endorses the inanimate drug as doing this or that, individual dissent or faith, unless it rests on Science, is but a belief held by a minority, and such a belief is governed by the majority.
Belief in physics
The universal belief in physics weighs against the high and mighty truths of Christian metaphysics. This erroneous general belief, which sustains medicine and produces all medical results, works against Christian Science; and the percentage of power on the side of this Science must mightily outweigh the power of popular belief in order to heal a single case of disease. The human mind acts more powerfully to offset the discords of matter and the ills of flesh, in proportion as it puts less weight into the material or fleshly scale and more weight into the spiritual scale. Homoeopathy diminishes the drug, but the potency of the medicine increases as the drug disappears.
Nature of drugs
Vegetarianism, homoeopathy, and hydropathy have diminished drugging; but if drugs are an antidote to disease, why lessen the antidote? If drugs are good things, is it safe to say that the less in quantity you have of them the better? If drugs possess intrinsic virtues or intelligent curative qualities, these qualities must be mental. Who named drugs, and what made them good or bad for mortals, beneficial or injurious?
Dropsy cured without drugs
A case of dropsy, given up by the faculty, fell into my hands. It was a terrible case. Tapping had been employed, and yet, as she lay in her bed, the patient looked like a barrel. I prescribed the fourth attenuation of Argentum nitratum with occasional doses of a high attenuation of Sulphuris. She improved perceptibly. Believing then somewhat in the ordinary theories of medical practice, and learning that her former physician had prescribed these remedies, I began to fear an aggravation of symptoms from their prolonged use, and told the patient so; but she was unwilling to give up the medicine while she was recovering. It then occurred to me to give her unmedicated pellets and watch the result. I did so, and she continued to gain. Finally she said that she would give up her medicine for one day, and risk the effects. After trying this, she informed me that she could get along two days without globules; but on the third day she again suffered, and was relieved by taking them. She went on in this way, taking the unmedicated pellets,–and receiving occasional visits from me,–but employing no other means, and she was cured.
A stately advance
Metaphysics, as taught in Christian Science, is the next stately step beyond homoeopathy. In metaphysics, matter disappears from the remedy entirely, and Mind takes its rightful and supreme place. Homoeopathy takes mental symptoms largely into consideration in its diagnosis of disease. Christian Science deals wholly with the mental cause in judging and destroying disease. It succeeds where homoeopathy fails, solely because its one recognized Principle of healing is Mind, and the whole force of the mental element is employed through the Science of Mind, which never shares its rights with inanimate matter.
The modus of homoeopathy
Christian Science exterminates the drug, and rests on Mind alone as the curative Principle, acknowledging that the divine Mind has all power. Homoeopathy mentalizes a drug with such repetition of thought-attenuations, that the drug becomes more like the human mind than the substratum of this socalled mind, which we call matter; and the drug’s power of action is proportionately increased.
Drugging unchristian
If drugs are part of God’s creation, which (according to the narrative in Genesis) He pronounced good, then drugs cannot be poisonous. If He could create drugs intrinsically bad, then they should never be used. If He creates drugs at all and designs them for medical use, why did Jesus not employ them and recommend them for the treatment of disease? Matter is not self-creative, for it is unintelligent. Erring mortal mind confers the power which the drug seems to possess.
Narcotics quiet mortal mind, and so relieve the body; but they leave both mind and body worse for this submission. Christian Science impresses the entire corporeality,–namely, mind and body,–and brings out the proof that Life is continuous and harmonious. Science both neutralizes error and destroys it. Mankind is the better for this spiritual and profound pathology.
Mythology and materia medica
It is recorded that the profession of medicine 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 have dictated 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, “the god of pestilence.” Hippocrates turned from image-gods to vegetable and mineral drugs for healing. This was deemed progress in medicine; but what we need is the truth which heals both mind and body. The future history of material medicine may correspond with that of its material god, Apollo, who was banished from heaven and endured great sufferings upon earth.
Footsteps to intemperance
Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine Mind and its efficacy to heal. It is pitiful to lead men into temptation through the byways of this wilderness world,–to victimize the race with intoxicating prescriptions for the sick, until mortal mind acquires an educated appetite for strong drink, and men and women become loathsome sots.
Advancing degrees
Evidences of progress and of spiritualization greet us on every hand. Drug-systems are quitting their hold on matter and so letting in matter’s higher stratum, mortal mind. Homoeopathy, a step in advance of allopathy, is doing this. Matter is going out of medicine; and mortal mind, of a higher attenuation than the drug, is governing the pellet.
Effects of fear
A woman in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts, was etherized and died in consequence, although her physicians insisted that it would be unsafe to perform a needed surgical operation without the ether. After the autopsy, her sister testified that the deceased protested against inhaling the ether and said it would kill her, but that she was compelled by her physicians to take it. Her hands were held, and she was forced into submission. The case was brought to trial. The evidence was found to be conclusive, and a verdict was returned that death was occasioned, not by the ether, but by fear of inhaling it.
Mental conditions to be heeded
Is it skilful or scientific surgery to take no heed of mental conditions and to treat the patient as if she were so much mindless matter, and as if matter were the only factor to be consulted? Had these unscientific surgeons understood metaphysics, they would have considered the woman’s state of mind, and not have risked such treatment. They would either have allayed her fear or would have performed the operation without ether.
The sequel proved that this Lynn woman died from effects produced by mortal mind, and not from the disease or the operation.
False source of knowledge
The medical schools would learn the state of man from matter instead of from Mind. They examine the lungs, tongue, and pulse to ascertain how much harmony, or health, matter is permitting to matter,–how much pain or pleasure, action or stagnation, one form of matter is allowing another form of matter.
Ignorant of the fact that a man’s belief produces disease and all its symptoms, the ordinary physician is liable to increase disease with his own mind, when he should address himself to the work of destroying it through the power of the divine Mind.
The systems of physics act against metaphysics, and vice versa. When mortals forsake the material for the spiritual basis of action, drugs lose their healing force, for they have no innate power. Unsupported by the faith reposed in it, the inanimate drug becomes powerless.
Obedient muscles
The motion of the arm is no more dependent upon the direction of mortal mind, than are the organic action and secretion of the viscera. When this so-called mind quits the body, the heart becomes as torpid as the hand.
Anatomy and mind
Anatomy finds a necessity for nerves to convey the mandate of mind to muscle and so cause action; but what does anatomy say when the cords contract and become immovable? Has mortal mind ceased speaking to them, or has it bidden them to be impotent? Can muscles, bones, blood, and nerves rebel against mind in one instance and not in another, and become cramped despite the mental protest?
Unless muscles are self-acting at all times, they are never so,–never capable of acting contrary to mental direction. If muscles can cease to act and become rigid of their own preference,–be deformed or symmetrical, as they please or as disease directs, – they must be selfdirecting. Why then consult anatomy to learn how mortal mind governs muscle, if we are only to learn from anatomy that muscle is not so governed?
Mind over matter
Is man a material fungus without Mind to help him? Is a stiff joint or a contracted muscle as much a result of law as the supple and elastic condition of the healthy limb, and is God the lawgiver?
You say, “I have burned my finger.” This is an exact statement, more exact than you suppose; for mortal mind, and not matter, burns it. Holy inspiration has created states of mind which have been able to nullify the action of the flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might produce spontaneous combustion.
Restrictive regulations
In 1880, Massachusetts put her foot on a proposed tyrannical law, restricting the practice of medicine. If her sister States follow this example in harmony with our Constitution and Bill of Rights, they will do less violence to that immortal sentiment of the Declaration, “Man is endowed by his Maker with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The oppressive state statutes touching medicine remind one of the words of the famous Madame Roland, as she knelt before a statue of Liberty, erected near the guillotine: “Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!”
Metaphysics challenges physics
The ordinary practitioner, examining bodily symptoms, telling the patient that he is sick, and treating the case according to his physical diagnosis, would naturally induce the very disease he is trying to cure, even if it were not already determined by mortal mind. Such unconscious mistakes would not occur, if this old class of philanthropists looked as deeply for cause and effect into mind as into matter. The physician agrees with his “adversary quickly,” but upon different terms than does the metaphysician; for the matter-physician agrees with the disease, while the metaphysician agrees only with health and challenges disease.
Truth an alterative
Christian Science brings to the body the sunlight of Truth, which invigorates and purifies. Christian Science acts as an alterative, neutralizing error with Truth. It changes the secretions, expels humors, dissolves tumors, relaxes rigid muscles, restores carious bones to soundness. The effect of this Science is to stir the human mind to a change of base, on which it may yield to the harmony of the divine Mind.
Practical success
Experiments have favored the fact that Mind governs the body, not in one instance, but in every instance. The indestructible faculties of Spirit exist without the conditions of matter and also without the false beliefs of a so-called material existence. Working out the rules of Science in practice, the author has restored health in cases of both acute and chronic disease in their severest forms. Secretions have been changed, the structure has been renewed, shortened limbs have been elongated, ankylosed joints have been made supple, and carious bones have been restored to healthy conditions. I have restored what is called the lost substance of lungs, and healthy organizations have been established where disease was organic. Christian Science heals organic disease as surely as it heals what is called functional, for it requires only a fuller understanding of the divine Principle of Christian Science to demonstrate the higher rule.
Testimony of medical teachers
With due respect for the faculty, I kindly quote from Dr. Benjamin Rush, the famous Philadelphia teacher of medical practice. He declared that “it is impossible to calculate the mischief which Hippocrates has done, by first marking Nature with his name, and afterward letting her loose upon sick people.”
Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, Professor in Harvard University, declared himself “sick of learned quackery.”
Dr. James Johnson, Surgeon to William IV, King Of England, said:
“I declare my conscientious opinion, founded on long observation and reflection, that if there were not a single physician, surgeon, apothecary, man-midwife, chemist, druggist, or drug on the face of the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality.”
Dr. Mason Good, a learned Professor in London, said :
“The effects of medicine on the human system are in the highest degree uncertain; except, indeed, that it has already destroyed more lives than war, pestilence, and famine, all combined.”
Dr. Chapman, Professor of the Institutes and Practice of Physic in the University of Pennsylvania, in a published essay said
“Consulting the records of our science, we cannot help being disgusted with the multitude of hypotheses obtruded upon us at different times. Nowhere is the imagination displayed to a greater extent; and perhaps so ample an exhibition of human invention might gratify our vanity, if it were not more than compensated by the humiliating view of so much absurdity, contradiction, and falsehood. To harmonize the contrarieties of medical doctrines is indeed a task as impractible as to arrange the fleeting vapors around us, or to reconcile the fixed and repulsive antipathies of nature. Dark and perplexed, our devious career resembles the groping of Homer’s Cyclops around his cave.”
Sir John Forbes, M.D., F.R.S., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London, said:
“No systematic or theoretical classification of diseases or of therapeutic agents, ever yet promulgated, is true, or anything like the truth, and none can be adopted as a safe guidance in practice.”
It is just to say that generally the cultured class of medical practitioners are grand men and women, therefore they are more scientific than are false claimants to Christian Science. But all human systems based on material premises are minus the unction of divine Science. Much yet remains to be said and done before all mankind is saved and all the mental microbes of sin and all diseased thought-germs are exterminated.
If you or I should appear to die, we should not be dead. The seeming decease, caused by a majority of human beliefs that man must die, or produced by mental assassins, does not in the least disprove Christian Science; rather does it evidence the truth of its basic proposition that mortal thoughts in belief rule the materiality miscalled life in the body or in matter. But the forever fact remains paramount that Life, Truth, and Love save from sin, disease, and death. “When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality [divine Science], then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory” (St. Paul).
Chapter VII – Physiology
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?–JESUS.
He sent His word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions.–PSALMS.
PHYSIOLOGY is one of the apples from “the tree of knowledge.” Evil declared that eating this fruit would open man’s eyes and make him as a god. Instead of so doing, it closed the eyes of mortals to man’s Godgiven dominion over the earth.
Man not structural
To measure intellectual capacity by the size of the brain and strength by the exercise of muscle, is to subjugate intelligence, to make mind mortal, and to place this so-called mind at the mercy of material organization and non-intelligent matter.
Obedience to the so-called physical laws of health has not checked sickness. Diseases have multiplied, since man-made material theories took the place of spiritual truth.
Causes of sickness
You say that indigestion, fatigue, sleeplessness, cause distressed stomachs and aching heads. Then you consult your brain in order to remember what has hurt you, when your remedy lies in forgetting the whole thing; for matter has no sensation of its own, and the human mind is all that can produce pain. As a man thinketh, so is he. Mind is all that feels, acts, or impedes action. Ignorant of this, or shrinking from its implied responsibility, the healing effort is made on the wrong side, and thus the conscious control over the body is lost.
Delusions pagan and medical
The Mohammedan believes in a pilgrimage to Mecca for the salvation of his soul. The popular doctor believes in his prescription, and the pharmacist believes in the power of his drugs to save a man’s life. The Mohammedan’s belief is a religious delusion; the doctor’s and pharmacist’s is a medical mistake.
Health from reliance on spirituality
The erring human mind is inharmonious in itself. From it arises the inharmonious body. To ignore God as of little use in sickness is a mistake. Instead of thrusting Him aside in times of bodily trouble, and waiting for the hour of strength in which to acknowledge Him, we should learn that He can do all things for us in sickness as in health.
Failing to recover health through adherence to physiology and hygiene, the despairing invalid often drops them, and in his extremity and only as a last resort, turns to God. The invalid’s faith in the divine Mind is less than in drugs, air, and exercise, or he would have resorted to Mind first. The balance of power is conceded to be with matter by most of the medical systems; but when Mind at last asserts its mastery over sin, disease, and death, then is man found to be harmonious and immortal.
Should we implore a corporeal God to heal the sick out of His personal volition, or should we understand the infinite divine Principle which heals? If we rise no higher than blind faith, the Science of healing is not attained, and Soul-existence, in the place of sense-existence, is not comprehended. We apprehend Life in divine Science only as we live above corporeal sense and correct it. Our proportionate admission of the claims of good or of evil determines the harmony of our existence,–our health, our longevity, and our Christianity.
The two masters
We cannot serve two masters nor perceive divine Science with the material senses. Drugs and hygiene cannot successfully usurp the place and power of the divine source of all health and perfection. If God made man both good and evil, man must remain thus. What can improve God’s work? Again, an error in the premise must appear in the conclusion. To have one God and avail yourself of the power of Spirit, you must love God supremely.
Half-way success
The “flesh lusteth against the Spirit.” The flesh and Spirit can no more unite in action, than good can coincide with evil. It is not wise to take a halting and half-way position or to expect to work equally with Spirit and matter, Truth and error. There, is but one way–namely, God and His idea–which leads to spiritual being. The scientific government of the body must be attained through the divine Mind. It is impossible to gain control over the body in any other way. On this fundamental point, timid conservatism is absolutely inadmissible. Only through radical reliance on Truth can scientific healing power be realized.
Substituting good words for a good life, fair seeming for straightforward character, is a poor shift for the weak and worldly, who think the standard of Christian Science too high for them.
Belief on the wrong side
If the scales are evenly adjusted, the removal of a single weight from either scale gives preponderance to the opposite. Whatever influence you cast on the side of matter, you take away from Mind, which would otherwise outweigh all else. Your belief militates against your health, when it ought to be enlisted on the side of health. When sick (according to belief) you rush after drugs, search out the material so-called laws of health, and depend upon them to heal you, though you have already brought yourself into the slough of disease through just this false belief.
The divine authority
Because man-made systems insist that man becomes sick and useless, suffers and dies, all in consonance with the laws of God, are we to believe it? Are we to believe an authority which denies God’s spiritual command relating to perfection,–an authority which Jesus proved to be false? He did the will of the Father. He healed sickness in defiance of what is called material law, but in accordance with God’s law, the law of Mind.
Disease foreseen
I have discerned disease in the human mind, and recognized the patient’s fear of it, months before the so-called disease made its appearance in the body. Disease being a belief, a latent illusion of mortal mind, the sensation would not appear if the error of belief was met and destroyed by truth.
Changed mentality
Here let a word be noticed which will be better understood hereafter,–chemicalization. By chemicalization I mean the process which mortal mind and body undergo in the change of belief from a material to a spiritual basis.
Scientific foresight
Whenever an aggravation of symptoms has occurred through mental chemicalization, I have seen the mental signs, assuring me that danger was over, before the patient felt the change; and I have said to the patient, “You are healed,” – sometimes to his discomfiture, when he was incredulous. But it always came about as I had foretold.
I name these facts to show that disease has a mental, mortal origin,–that faith in rules of health or in drugs begets and fosters disease by attracting the mind to the subject of sickness, by exciting fear of disease, and by dosing the body in order to avoid it. The faith reposed in these things should find stronger supports and a higher home. If we understood the control of Mind over body, we should put no faith in material means.
Mind the only healer
Science not only reveals the origin of all disease as mental, but it also declares that all disease is cured by divine Mind. There can be no healing except by this Mind, however much we trust a drug or any other means towards which human faith or endeavor is directed. It is mortal mind, not matter, which brings to the sick whatever good they may seem to receive from materiality. But the sick are never really healed except by means of the divine power. Only the action of Truth, Life, and Love can give harmony.
Modes of matter
Whatever teaches man to have other laws and to acknowledge other powers than the divine Mind, is anti-Christian. The good that a poisonous drug seems to do is evil, for it robs man of reliance on God, omnipotent Mind, and according to belief, poisons the human system. Truth is not the basis of theogony. Modes of matter form neither a moral nor a spiritual system. The discord which calls for material methods is the result of the exercise of faith in material modes,–faith in matter instead of in Spirit.
Physiology unscientific
Did Jesus understand the economy of man less than Graham or Cutter? Christian ideas certainly present what human theories exclude–the Principle of man’s harmony. The text, “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die,” not only contradicts human systems, but points to the self-sustaining and eternal Truth.
The demands of Truth are spiritual, and reach the body through Mind. The best interpreter of man’s needs said: “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink.”
If there are material laws which prevent disease, what then causes it? Not divine law, for Jesus healed the sick and cast out error, always in opposition, never in obedience, to physics.
Causation considered
Spiritual causation is the one question to be considered, for more than all others spiritual causation relates to human progress. The age seems ready to approach this subject, to ponder somewhat the supremacy of Spirit, and at least to touch the hem of Truth’s garment.
The description of man as purely physical, or as both material and spiritual,–but in either case dependent upon his physical organization,–is the Pandora box, from which all ills have gone forth, especially despair. Matter, which takes divine power into its own hands and claims to be a creator, is a fiction, in which paganism and lust are so sanctioned by society that mankind has caught their moral contagion.
Paradise regained
Through discernment of the spiritual opposite of materiality, even the way through Christ, Truth, man will reopen with the key of divine Science the gates of Paradise which human beliefs have closed, and will find himself unfallen, upright, pure, and free, not needing to consult almanacs for the probabilities either of his life or of the weather, not needing to study brainology to learn how much of a man he is.
A closed question
Mind’s control over the universe, including man, is no longer an open question, but is demonstrable Science. Jesus illustrated the divine Principle and the power of immortal Mind by healing sickness and sin and destroying the foundations of death.
Matter versus Spirit
Mistaking his origin and nature, man believes himself to be combined matter and Spirit. He believes that Spirit is sifted through matter, carried on a nerve, exposed to ejection by the operation of matter. The intellectual, the moral, the spiritual,–yea, the image of infinite Mind,–subject to non-intelligence!
No more sympathy exists between the flesh and Spirit than between Belial and Christ.
The so-called laws of matter are nothing but false beliefs that intelligence and life are present where Mind is not. These false beliefs are the procuring cause of all sin and disease. The opposite truth, that intelligence and life are spiritual, never material, destroys sin, sickness, and death.
The fundamental error lies in the supposition that man is a material outgrowth and that the cognizance of good or evil, which he has through the bodily senses, constitutes his happiness or misery.
Godless Evolution
Theorizing about man’s development from mushrooms to monkeys and from monkeys into men amounts to nothing in the right direction and very much in the wrong.
Materialism grades the human species as rising from matter upward. How then is the material species maintained, if man passes through what we call death and death is the Rubicon of spirituality? Spirit can form no real link in this supposed chain of material being. But divine Science reveals the eternal chain of existence as uninterrupted and wholly spiritual; yet this can be realized only as the false sense of being disappears.
Degrees of development
If man was first a material being, he must have passed through all the forms of matter in order to become man. If the material body is man, he is a portion of matter, or dust. On the contrary, man is the image and likeness of Spirit; and the belief that there is Soul in sense or Life in matter obtains in mortals, alias mortal mind, to which the apostle refers when he says that we must “put off the old man.”
Identity not lost
What is man? Brain, heart, blood, bones, etc., the material structure? If the real man is in the material body, you take away a portion of the man when you amputate a limb; the surgeon destroys manhood, and worms annihilate it. But the loss of a limb or injury to a tissue is sometimes the quickener of manliness; and the unfortunate cripple may present more nobility than the statuesque athlete,–teaching us by his very deprivations, that “a man’s a man, for a’ that.”
When man is man
When we admit that matter (heart, blood, brain, acting through the five physical senses) constitutes man, we fail to see how anatomy can distinguish between humanity and the brute, or determine when man is really man and has progressed farther than his animal progenitors.
Individualization
When the supposition, that Spirit is within what it creates and the potter is subject to the clay, is individualized, Truth is reduced to the level of error, and the sensible is required to be made manifest through the insensible.
What is termed matter manifests nothing but a material mentality. Neither the substance nor the manifestation of Spirit is obtainable through matter. Spirit is positive. Matter is Spirit’s contrary, the absence of Spirit. For positive Spirit to pass through a negative condition would be Spirit’s destruction.
Man not structural
Anatomy declares man to be structural. Physiology continues this explanation, measuring human strength by bones and sinews, and human life by material law. Man is spiritual, individual, and eternal; material structure is mortal. Phrenology makes man knavish or honest according to the development of the cranium; but anatomy, physiology, phrenology, do not define the image of God, the real immortal man.
Human reason and religion come slowly to the recognition of spiritual facts, and so continue to call upon matter to remove the error which the human mind alone has created.
The idols of civilization are far more fatal to health and longevity than are the idols of barbarism. The idols of civilization call into action less faith than Buddhism in a supreme governing intelligence. The Esquimaux restore health by incantations as consciously as do civilized practitioners by their more studied methods.
Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air? Nothing save divine power is capable of doing so much for man as he can do for himself.
Rise of thought
The footsteps of thought, rising above material standpoints, are slow, and portend a long night to the traveller; but the angels of His presence–the spiritual intuitions that tell us when “the night is far spent, the day is at hand”–are our guardians in the gloom. Whoever opens the way in Christian Science is a pilgrim and stranger, marking out the path for generations yet unborn.
The thunder of Sinai and the Sermon on the Mount are pursuing and will overtake the ages, rebuking in their course all error and proclaiming the kingdom of heaven on earth. Truth is revealed. It needs only to be practised.
Medical errors
Mortal belief is all that enables a drug to cure mortal ailments. Anatomy admits that mind is somewhere in man, though out of sight. Then, if an individual is sick, why treat the body alone and administer a dose of despair to the mind? Why declare that the body is diseased, and picture this disease to the mind, rolling it under the tongue as a sweet morsel and holding it before the thought of both physician and patient? We should understand that the cause of disease obtains in the mortal human mind, and its cure comes from the immortal divine Mind. We should prevent the images of disease from taking form in thought, and we should efface the outlines of disease already formulated in the minds of mortals.
Novel Diseases
When there are fewer prescriptions, and less thought is given to sanitary subjects, there will be better constitutions and less disease. In old times who ever heard of dyspepsia, cerebro-spinal meningitis, hay-fever, and rose-cold?
What an abuse of natural beauty to say that a rose, the smile of God, can produce suffering! The joy of its presence, its beauty and fragrance, should uplift the thought, and dissuade any sense of fear or fever. It is profane to fancy that the perfume of clover and the breath of new-mown hay can cause glandular inflammation, sneezing, and nasal pangs.
No ancestral dyspepsia
If a random thought, calling itself dyspepsia, had tried to tyrannize over our forefathers, it would have been routed by their independence and industry. Then people had less time for selfishness, coddling, and sickly after-dinner talk. The exact amount of food the stomach could digest was not discussed according to Cutter nor referred to sanitary laws. A man’s belief in those days was not so severe upon the gastric juices. Beaumont’s “Medical Experiments” did not govern the digestion.
Pulmonary misbeliefs
Damp atmosphere and freezing snow empurpled the plump cheeks of our ancestors, but they never indulged in the refinement of inflamed bronchial tubes. They were as innocent as Adam, before he ate the fruit of false knowledge, of the existence of tubercles and troches, lungs and lozenges.
Our modern Eves
“Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise,” says the English poet, and there is truth in his sentiment. The action of mortal mind on the body was not so injurious before inquisitive modern Eves took up the study of medical works and unmanly Adams attributed their own downfall and the fate of their offspring to the weakness of their wives.
The primitive custom of taking no thought about food left the stomach and bowels free to act in obedience to nature, and gave the gospel a chance to be seen in its glorious effects upon the body. A ghastly array of diseases was not paraded before the imagination. There were fewer books on digestion and more “sermons in stones, and good in everything.” When the mechanism of the human mind gives place to the divine Mind, selfishness and sin, disease and death, will lose their foothold.
Human fear of miasma would load with disease the air of Eden, and weigh down mankind with superimposed and conjectural evils. Mortal mind is the worst foe of the body, while divine Mind is its best friend.
Diseases not to be classified
Should all cases of organic disease be treated by a regular practitioner, and the Christian Scientist try truth only in cases of hysteria, hypochondria, and hallucination? One disease is no more real than another. All disease is the result of education, and disease can carry its ill-effects no farther than mortal mind maps out the way. The human mind, not matter, is supposed to feel, suffer, enjoy. Hence decided types of acute disease are quite as ready to yield to Truth as the less distinct type and chronic form of disease. Truth handles the most malignant contagion with perfect assurance.
One basis for all sickness
Human mind produces what is termed organic disease as certainly as it produces hysteria, and it must relinquish all its errors, sicknesses, and sins. I have demonstrated this beyond all cavil. The evidence of divine Mind’s healing power and absolute control is to me as certain as the evidence of my own existence.
Mental and physical oneness
Mortal mind and body are one. Neither exists without the other, and both must be destroyed by immortal Mind. Matter, or body, is but a false concept of mortal mind. This so-called mind builds its own superstructure, of which the material body is the grosser portion; but from first to last, the body is a sensuous, human concept.
The effect of names
In the Scriptural allegory of the material creation, Adam or error, which represents the erroneous theory of life and intelligence in matter , had the naming of all that was material. These names indicated matter’s properties, qualities, and forms. But a lie, the opposite of Truth, cannot name the qualities and effects of what is termed matter, and create the so-called laws of the flesh, nor can a lie hold the preponderance of power in any direction against God, Spirit and Truth.
Poison defined mentally
If a dose of poison is swallowed through mistake, and the patient dies even though physician and patient are expecting favorable results, does human belief, you ask, cause this death? Even so, and as directly as if the poison had been intentionally taken.
In such cases a few persons believe the potion swallowed by the patient to be harmless, but the vast majority of mankind, though they know nothing of this particular case and this special person, believe the arsenic, the strychnine, or whatever the drug used, to be poisonous, for it is set down as a poison by mortal mind. Consequently, the result is controlled by the majority of opinions, not by the infinitesimal minority of opinions in the sick-chamber.
Heredity is not a law. The remote cause or belief of disease is not dangerous because of its priority and the connection of past mortal thoughts with present. The predisposing cause and the exciting cause are mental.
Perhaps an adult has a deformity produced prior to his birth by the fright of his mother. When wrested from human belief and based on Science or the divine Mind, to which all things are possible, that chronic case is not difficult to cure.
Animal magnetism destroyed
Mortal mind, acting from the basis of sensation in matter, is animal magnetism; but this so-called mind, from which comes all evil, contradicts itself, and must finally yield to the eternal Truth, or the divine Mind, expressed in Science. In proportion to our understanding of Christian Science, we are freed from the belief of heredity, of mind in matter or animal magnetism; and we disarm sin of its imaginary power in proportion to our spiritual understanding of the status of immortal being.
Ignorant of the methods and the basis of metaphysical healing, you may attempt to unite with it hypnotism, spiritualism, electricity; but none of these methods can be mingled with metaphysical healing.
Whoever reaches the understanding of Christian Science in its proper signification will perform the sudden cures of which it is capable; but this can be done only by taking up the cross and following Christ in the daily life.
Absent patients
Science can heal the sick, who are absent from their healers, as well as those present, since space is no obstacle to Mind. Immortal Mind heals what eye hath not seen; but the spiritual capacity to ap- prehend thought and to heal by the Truth-power, is won only as man is found, not in self-righteousness, but reflecting the divine nature.
Horses mistaught
Every medical method has its advocates. The preference of mortal mind for a certain method creates a demand for that method, and the body then seems to require such treatment. You can even educate a healthy horse so far in physiology that he will take cold without his blanket, whereas the wild animal, left to his instincts, sniffs the wind with delight. The epizootic is a humanly evolved ailment, which a wild horse might never have.
Medical works objectionable
Treatises on anatomy, physiology, and health, sustained by what is termed material law, are the promoters of sickness and disease. It should not be proverbial, that so long as you read medical works you will be sick.
The sedulous matron – studying her Jahr with homoeopathic pellet and powder in hand, ready to put you into a sweat, to move the bowels, or to produce sleep is unwittingly sowing the seeds of reliance on matter, and her household may erelong reap the effect of this mistake.
Descriptions of disease given by physicians and advertisements of quackery are both prolific sources of sickness. As mortal mind is the husbandman of error, it should be taught to do the body no harm and to uproot its false sowing.
The invalid’s outlook
The patient sufferer tries to be satisfied when he sees his would-be healers busy, and his faith in their efforts is somewhat helpful to them and to himself; but in Science one must understand the resuscitating law of Life. This is the seed within itself bearing fruit after its kind, spoken of in Genesis.
Physicians should not deport themselves as if Mind were non-existent, nor take the ground that all causation is matter, instead of Mind. Ignorant that the human mind governs the body, its phenomenon, the invalid may unwittingly add more fear to the mental reservoir already overflowing with that emotion.
Wrong and right way
Doctors should not implant disease in the thoughts of their patients, as they so frequently do, by declaring disease to be a fixed fact, even before they go to work to eradicate the disease through the material faith which they inspire. Instead of furnishing thought with fear, they should try to correct this turbulent element of mortal mind by the influence of divine Love which casteth out fear.
When man is governed by God, the ever-present Mind who understands all things, man knows that with God all things are possible. The only way to this living Truth, which heals the sick, is found in the Science of divine Mind as taught and demonstrated by Christ Jesus.
The important decision
To reduce inflammation, dissolve a tumor, or cure organic disease, I have found divine Truth more potent than all lower remedies. And why not, since Mind, God, is the source and condition of all existence? Before deciding that the body, matter, is disordered, one should ask, “Who art thou that repliest to Spirit? Can matter speak for itself, or does it hold the issues of life?” Matter, which can neither suffer nor enjoy, has no partnership with pain and pleasure, but mortal belief has such a partnership.
Manipulation unscientific
When you manipulate patients, you trust in electricity and magnetism more than in Truth; and for that reason, you employ matter rather than Mind. You weaken or destroy your power when you resort to any except spiritual means.
It is foolish to declare that you manipulate patients but that you lay no stress on manipulation. If this be so, why manipulate? In reality you manipulate because you are ignorant of the baneful effects of magnetism, or are not sufficiently spiritual to depend on Spirit. In either case you must improve your mental condition till you finally attain the understanding of Christian Science.
Not words but deeds
If you are too material to love the Science of Mind and are satisfied with good words instead of effects, if you adhere to error and are afraid to trust Truth, the question then recurs, “Adam, where art thou?” It is unnecessary to resort to aught besides Mind in order to satisfy the sick that you are doing something for them, for if they are cured, they generally know it and are satisfied.
“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” If you have more faith in drugs than in Truth, this faith will incline you to the side of matter and error. Any hypnotic power you may exercise will diminish your ability to become a Scientist, and vice versa. The act of healing the sick through divine Mind alone, of casting out error with Truth, shows your position as a Christian Scientist.
Physiology or Spirit
The demands of God appeal to thought only; but the claims of mortality, and what are termed laws of nature, appertain to matter. Which, then, are we to accept as legitimate and capable of producing the highest human good? We cannot obey both physiology and Spirit, for one absolutely destroys the other, and one or the other must be supreme in the affections. It is impossible to work from two standpoints. If we attempt it, we shall presently “hold to the one, and despise the other.”
The hypotheses of mortals are antagonistic to Science and cannot mix with it. This is clear to those, who heal the sick on the basis of Science.
No material law
Mind’s government of the body must supersede the socalled laws of matter. Obedience to material law prevents full obedience to spiritual law,–the law which overcomes material conditions and puts matter under the feet of Mind. Mortals entreat the divine Mind to heal the sick, and forthwith shut out the aid of Mind by using material means, thus working against themselves and their prayers and denying man’s Godgiven ability to demonstrate Mind’s sacred power. Pleas for drugs and laws of health come from some sad incident, or else from ignorance of Christian Science and its transcendent power.
To admit that sickness is a condition over which God has no control, is to presuppose that omnipotent power is powerless on some occasions. The law of Christ, or Truth, makes all things possible to Spirit; but the socalled laws of matter would render Spirit of no avail, and demand obedience to materialistic codes, thus departing from the basis of one God, one lawmaker. To suppose that God constitutes laws of inharmony is a mistake; discords have no support from nature or divine law, however much is said to the contrary.
Can the agriculturist, according to belief, produce a crop without sowing the seed and awaiting its germination according to the laws of nature? The answer is no, and yet the Scriptures inform us that sin, or error, first caused the condemnation of man to till the ground, and indicate that obedience to God will remove this necessity. Truth never made error necessary, nor devised a law to perpetuate error.
Laws of nature spiritual
The supposed laws which result in weariness and disease are not His laws, for the legitimate and only possible action of Truth is the production of harmony. Laws of nature are laws of Spirit; but mortals commonly recognize as law that which hides the power of Spirit. Divine Mind rightly demands man’s entire obedience, affection, and strength. No reservation is made for any lesser loyalty. Obedience to Truth gives man power and strength. Submission to error superinduces loss of power.
Belief and understanding
Truth casts out all evils and materialistic methods with the actual spiritual law,–the law which gives sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, voice to the dumb, feet to the lame. If Christian Science dishonors human belief, it honors spiritual understanding; and the one Mind only is entitled to honor.
The so-called laws of health are simply laws of mortal belief. The premises being erroneous, the conclusions are wrong. Truth makes no laws to regulate sickness, sin, and death, for these are unknown to Truth and should not be recognized as reality.
Belief produces the results of belief, and the penalties it affixes last so long as the belief and are inseparable from it. The remedy consists in probing the trouble to the bottom, in finding and casting out by denial the error of belief which produces a mortal disorder, never honoring erroneous belief with the title of law nor yielding obedience to it. Truth, Life, and Love are the only legitimate and eternal demands on man, and they are spiritual lawgivers, enforcing obedience through divine statutes.
Laws of human belief
Controlled by the divine intelligence, man is harmonious and eternal. Whatever is governed by a false belief is discordant and mortal. We say man suffers from the effects of cold, heat, fatigue. This is human belief, not the truth of being, for matter cannot suffer. Mortal mind alone suffers,–not because a law of matter has been transgressed, but because a law of this so-called mind has been disobeyed. I have demonstrated this as a rule of divine Science by destroying the delusion of suffering from what is termed a fatally broken physical law.
A woman, whom I cured of consumption, always breathed with great difficulty when the wind was from the east. I sat silently by her side a few moments. Her breath came gently. The inspirations were deep and natural. I then requested her to look at the weather-vane. She looked and saw that it pointed due east. The wind had not changed, but her thought of it had and so her difficulty in breathing had gone. The wind had not produced the difficulty. My metaphysical treatment changed the action of her belief on the lungs, and she never suffered again from east winds, but was restored to health.
A so-called mind-cure
No system of hygiene but Christian Science is purely mental. Before this book was published, other books were in circulation, which discussed “mental medicine” and “mind-cure,” operating through the power of the earth’s magnetic currents to regulate life and health. Such theories and such systems of so-called mind-cure, which have sprung up, are as material as the prevailing systems of medicine. They have their birth in mortal mind, which puts forth a human conception in the name of Science to match the divine Science of immortal Mind, even as the necromancers of Egypt strove to emulate the wonders wrought by Moses. Such theories have no relationship to Christian Science, which rests on the conception of God as the only Life, substance, and intelligence, and excludes the human mind as a spiritual factor in the healing work.
Jesus and hypnotism
Jesus cast out evil and healed the sick, not only without drugs, but without hypnotism, which is the reverse of ethical and pathological Truthpower.
Erroneous mental practice may seem for a time to benefit the sick, but the recovery is not permanent. This is because erroneous methods act on and through the material stratum of the human mind, called brain, which is but a mortal consolidation of material mentality and its suppositional activities.
False stimulus
A patient under the influence of mortal mind is healed only by removing the influence on him of this mind, by emptying his thought of the false stimulus and reaction of will-power and filling it with the divine energies of Truth.
Christian Science destroys material beliefs through the understanding of Spirit, and the thoroughness of this work determines health. Erring human mind-forces can work only evil under whatever name or pretence they are employed; for Spirit and matter, good and evil, light and darkness, cannot mingle.
Evil negative and self-destructive
Evil is a negation, because it is the absence of truth. It is nothing, because it is the absence of something. It is unreal, because it presupposes the absence of God, the omnipotent and omnipresent. Every mortal must learn that there is neither power nor reality in evil.
Evil is self-assertive. It says: “I am a real entity, overmastering good.” This falsehood should strip evil of all pretensions. The only power of evil is to destroy itself. It can never destroy one iota of good. Every attempt of evil to destroy good is a failure, and only aids in peremptorily punishing the evil-doer. If we concede the same reality to discord as to harmony, discord has as lasting a claim upon us as has harmony. If evil is as real as good, evil is also as immortal. If death is as real as Life, immortality is a myth. If pain is as real as the absence of pain, both must be immortal; and if so, harmony cannot be the law of being.
Ignorant idolatry
Mortal mind is ignorant of self, or it could never be self-deceived. If mortal mind knew how to be better, it would be better. Since it must believe in something besides itself, it enthrones matter as deity. The human mind has been an idolater from the beginning, having other gods and believing in more than the one Mind.
As mortals do not comprehend even mortal existence, how ignorant must they be of the all-knowing Mind and of His creations.
Here you may see how so-called material sense creates its own forms of thought, gives them material names, and then worships and fears them. With pagan blindness, it attributes to some material god or medicine an ability beyond itself. The beliefs of the human mind rob and enslave it, and then impute this result to another illusive personification, named Satan.
Action of mortal mind
The valves of the heart, opening and closing for the passage of the blood, obey the mandate of mortal mind as directly as does the hand, admittedly moved by the will. Anatomy allows the mental cause of the latter action, but not of the former.
We say, “My hand hath done it.” What is this my but mortal mind, the cause of all materialistic action? All voluntary, as well as miscalled involuntary, action of the mortal body is governed by this so-called mind, not by matter. There is no involuntary action. The divine Mind includes all action and volition, and man in Science is governed by this Mind. The human mind tries to classify action as voluntary and involuntary, and suffers from the attempt.
Death and the body
If you take away this erring mind, the mortal material body loses all appearance of life or action, and this socalled mind then calls itself dead; but the human mind still holds in belief a body, through which it acts and which appears to the human mind to live,–a body like the one it had before death. This body is put off only as the mortal, erring mind yields to God, immortal Mind, and man is found in His image.
Embryonic sinful thoughts
What is termed disease does not exist. It is neither mind nor matter. The belief of sin, which has grown terrible in strength and influence, is an unconscious error in the beginning,–an embryonic thought without motive; but afterwards it governs the so-called man. Passion, depraved appetites, dishonesty, envy, hatred, revenge ripen into action, only to pass from shame and woe to their final punishment.
Disease a dream
Mortal existence is a dream of pain and pleasure in matter, a dream of sin, sickness, and death; and it is like the dream we have in sleep, in which every one recognizes his condition to be wholly a state of mind. In both the waking, and the sleeping dream, the dreamer thinks that his body is material and the suffering is in that body.
The smile of the sleeper indicates the sensation produced physically by the pleasure of a dream. In the same way pain and pleasure, sickness and care, are traced upon mortals by unmistakable signs.
Sickness is a growth of error, springing from mortal ignorance or fear. Error rehearses error. What causes disease cannot cure it. The soil of disease is mortal mind, and you have an abundant or scanty crop of disease, according to the seedlings of fear. Sin and the fear of disease must be uprooted and cast out.
Sense yields to understanding
When darkness comes over the earth, the physical senses have no immediate evidence of a sun. The human eye knows not where the orb of day is, nor if it exists. Astronomy gives the desired information regarding the sun. The human or material senses yield to the authority of this science, and they are willing to leave with astronomy the explanation of the sun’s influence over the earth. If the eyes see no sun for a week, we still believe that there is solar light and heat. Science (in this instance named natural) raises the human thought above the cruder theories of the human mind, and casts out a fear.
In like manner mortals should no more deny the power of Christian Science to establish harmony and to explain the effect of mortal mind on the body, though the cause be unseen, than they should deny the existence of the sunlight when the orb of day disappears, or doubt that the sun will reappear. The sins of others should not make good men suffer.
Ascending the scale
We call the body material; but it is as truly mortal mind, according to its degree, as is the material brain which is supposed to furnish the evidence of all mortal thought or things. The human mortal mind, by an inevitable perversion, makes all things start from the lowest instead of from the highest mortal thought. The reverse is the case with all the formations of the immortal divine Mind. They proceed from the divine source; and so, in tracing them, we constantly ascend in infinite being.
Human reproduction
From mortal mind comes the reproduction of the species, – first the belief of inanimate, and then of animate matter. According to mortal thought, the development of embryonic mortal mind commences in the lower, basal portion of the brain, and goes on in an ascending scale by evolution, keeping always in the direct line of matter, for matter is the subjective condition of mortal mind.
Next we have the formation of so-called embryonic mortal mind, afterwards mortal men or mortals,–all this while matter is a belief, ignorant of itself, ignorant of what it is supposed to produce. The mortal says that an inanimate unconscious seedling is producing mortals, both body and mind; and yet neither a mortal mind nor the immortal Mind is found in brain or elsewhere in matter or in mortals.
Human stature
This embryonic and materialistic human belief called mortal man in turn fills itself with thoughts of pain and pleasure, of life and death, and arranges itself into five so-called senses, which presently measure mind by the size of a brain and the bulk of a body, called man.
Human frailty
Human birth, growth, maturity, and decay are as the grass springing from the soil with beautiful green blades, afterwards to wither and return to its native nothingness. This mortal seeming is temporal; it never merges into immortal being, but finally disappears, and immortal man, spiritual and eternal, is found to be the real man.
The Hebrew bard, swayed by mortal thoughts, thus swept his lyre with saddening strains on human existence:
As for man, his days are as grass:
As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;
And the place thereof shall know it no more.
When hope rose higher in the human heart, he sang:
As for me, I will behold Thy face in righteousness:
I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness.
. . . . .
For with Thee is the fountain of life;
In Thy light shall we see light.
The brain can give no idea of God’s man. It can take no cognizance of Mind. Matter is not the organ of infinite Mind.
As mortals give up the delusion that there is more than one Mind, more than one God, man in God’s likeness will appear, and this eternal man will include in that likeness no material element.
The immortal birth
As a material, theoretical life-basis is found to be a misapprehension of existence, the spiritual and divine Principle of man dawns upon human thought, and leads it to “where the young child was,” – even to the birth of a new-old idea, to the spiritual sense of being and of what Life includes. This the whole earth will be transformed by Truth on its pinions of light, chasing away the darkness of error.
Spiritual freedom
The human thought must free itself from self-imposed materiality and bondage. It should no longer ask of the head, heart, or lungs: What are man’s prospects for life? Mind is not helpless. Intelligence is not mute before non-intelligence.
By its own volition, not a blade of grass springs up, not a spray buds within the vale, not a leaf unfolds its fair outlines, not a flower starts from its cloistered cell.
The Science of being reveals man and immortality as based on Spirit. Physical sense defines mortal man as based on matter, and from this premise infers the mortality of the body.
No physical affinity
The illusive senses may fancy affinities with their opposites; but in Christian Science, Truth never mingles with error. Mind has no affinity with matter, and therefore Truth is able to cast out the ills of the flesh. Mind, God, sends forth the aroma of Spirit, the atmosphere of intelligence. The belief that a pulpy substance under the skull is mind is a mockery of intelligence, a mimicry of Mind.
We are Christian Scientists, only as we quit our reliance upon that which is false and grasp the true. We are not Christian Scientists until we leave all for Christ. Human opinions are not spiritual. They come from the hearing of the ear, from corporeality instead of from Principle, and from the mortal instead of from the immortal. Spirit is not separate from God. Spirit is God.
Human power a blind force
Erring power is a material belief, a blind miscalled force, the offspring of will and not of wisdom, of the mortal mind and not of the immortal. It is the headlong cataract, the devouring flame, the tempest’s breath. It is lightning and hurricane, all that is selfish, wicked, dishonest, and impure.
The one real power
Moral and spiritual might belong to Spirit, who holds the “wind in His fists;” and this teaching accords with Science and harmony. In Science, you can have no power opposed to God, and the physical senses must give up their false testimony. Your influence for good depends upon the weight you throw into the right scale. The good you do and embody gives you the only power obtainable. Evil is not power. It is a mockery of strength, which erelong betrays its weakness and falls, never to rise.
We walk in the footsteps of Truth and Love by following the example of our Master in the understanding of divine metaphysics. Christianity is the basis of true healing. Whatever holds human thought in line with unselfed love, receives directly the divine power.
Mind cures hip-disease
I was called to visit Mr. Clark in Lynn, who had been confined to his bed six months with hip-disease, caused by a fall upon a wooden spike when quite a boy. On entering the house I met his physician, who said that the patient was dying. The physician had just probed the ulcer on the hip, and said the bone was carious for several inches. He even showed me the probe, which had on it the evidence of this condition of the bone. The doctor went out. Mr. Clark lay with his eyes fixed and sightless. The dew of death was on his brow. I went to his bedside. In a few moments his face changed; its death-pallor gave place to a natural hue. The eyelids closed gently and the breathing became natural; he was asleep. In about ten minutes he opened his eyes and said: “I feel like a new man. My suffering is all gone.” It was between three and four o’clock in the afternoon when this took place.
I told him to rise, dress himself, and take supper with his family. He did so. The next day I saw him in the yard. Since then I have not seen him, but am informed that he went to work in two weeks. The discharge from the sore stopped, and the sore was healed. The diseased condition had continued there ever since the injury was received in boyhood.
Since his recovery I have been informed that his physician claims to have cured him, and that his mother has been threatened with incarceration in an insane asylum for saying: “It was none other than God and that woman who healed him.” I cannot attest the truth of that report, but what I saw and did for that man, and what his physician said of the case, occurred just as I have narrated.
It has been demonstrated to me that Life is God and that the might of omnipotent Spirit shares not its strength with matter or with human will. Reviewing this brief experience, I cannot fail to discern the coincidence of the spiritual idea of man with the divine Mind.
Change of belief
A change in human belief changes all the physical symptoms, and determines a case for better or for worse. When one’s false belief is corrected Truth sends a report of health over the body.
Destruction of the auditory nerve and paralysis of the optic nerve are not necessary to ensure deafness and blindness; for if mortal mind says, “I am deaf and blind,” it will be so without an injured nerve. Every theory opposed to this fact (as I learned in metaphysics) would presuppose man, who is immortal in spiritual understanding, a mortal in material belief.
Power of habit
The authentic history of Kaspar Hauser is a useful hint as to the frailty and inadequacy of mortal mind. It proves beyond a doubt that education constitutes this so-called mind, and that, in turn, mortal mind manifests itself in the body by the false sense it imparts. Incarcerated in a dungeon, where neither sight nor sound could reach him, at the age of seventeen Kaspar was still a mental infant, crying and chattering with no more intelligence than a babe, and realizing Tennyson’s description:
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.
His case proves material sense to be but a belief formed by education alone. The light which affords us joy gave him a belief of intense pain. His eyes were inflamed by the light. After the babbling boy had been taught to speak a few words, he asked to be taken back to his dungeon, and said that he should never be happy elsewhere. Outside of dismal darkness and cold silence he found no peace. Every sound convulsed him with anguish. All that he ate, except his black crust, produced violent retchings. All that gives pleasure to our educated senses gave him pain through those very senses, trained in an opposite direction.
Useful knowledge
The point for each one to decide is, whether it is mortal mind or immortal Mind that is causative. We should forsake the basis of matter for metaphysical Science and its divine Principle.
Whatever furnishes the semblance of an idea governed by its Principle, furnishes food for thought. Through astronomy, natural history, chemistry, music, mathematics, thought passes naturally from effect back to cause.
Academics of the right sort are requisite. Observation, invention, study, and original thought are expansive and should promote the growth of mortal mind out of itself, out of all that is mortal.
It is the tangled barbarisms of learning which we deplore,–the mere dogma, the speculative theory, the nauseous fiction. Novels, remarkable only for their exaggerated pictures, impossible ideals, and specimens of depravity, fill our young readers with wrong tastes and sentiments. Literary commercialism is lowering the intellectual standard to accommodate the purse and to meet a frivolous demand for amusement instead of for improvement. Incorrect views lower the standard of truth.
If materialistic knowledge is power, it is not wisdom. It is but a blind force. Man has “sought out many inventions,” but he has not yet found it true that knowledge can save him from the dire effects of knowledge. The power of mortal mind over its own body is little understood.
Sin destroyed through suffering
Better the suffering which awakens mortal mind from its fleshly dream, than the false pleasures which tend to perpetuate this dream. Sin alone brings death, for sin is the only element of destruction.
“Fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell,” said Jesus. A careful study of this text allows that here the word soul means a false sense or material consciousness. The command was a warning to beware, not of Rome, Satan, nor of God, but of sin. Sickness, sin, and death are not concomitants of Life or Truth. No law supports them. They have no relation to God wherewith to establish their power. Sin makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven.
Dangerous shoals avoided
Such books as will rule disease out of mortal mind, and so efface the images and thoughts of disease, instead of impressing them with forcible descriptions and medical details,–will help to abate sickness and to destroy it.
Many a hopeless case of disease is induced by a single post mortem examination,–not from infection nor from contact with material virus, but from the fear of the disease and from the image brought before the mind; it is a mental state, which is afterwards outlined on the body.
Pangs caused by the press
The press unwittingly sends forth many sorrows and diseases among the human family. It does this by giving names to diseases and by printing long descriptions which mirror images of disease distinctly in thought. A new name for an ailment affects people like a Parisian name for a novel garment. Every one hastens to get it. A minutely described disease costs many a man his earthly days of comfort. What a price for human knowledge! But the price does not exceed the original cost. God said of the tree of knowledge, which bears the fruit of sin, disease, and death, “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
Higher standard for mortals
The less that is said of physical structure and laws, and the more that is thought and said about moral and spiritual law, the higher will be the standard of living and the farther mortals will be removed from imbecility or disease.
We should master fear, instead of cultivating it. It was the ignorance of our forefathers in the departments of knowledge now broadcast in the earth, that made them hardier than our trained physiologists, more honest than our sleek politicians.
Diet and dyspepsia
We are told that the simple food our forefathers ate helped to make them healthy, but that is a mistake. Their diet would not cure dyspepsia at this period. With rules of health in the head and the most digestible food in the stomach, there would still be dyspeptics. Many of the effeminate constitutions of our time will never grow robust until individual opinions improve and immortal belief loses some portion of its error.
Harm done by physicians
The doctor’s mind reaches that of his patient. The doctor should suppress his fear of disease, else his belief in its reality and fatality will harm his patients even more than his calomel and morphine, for the higher stratum of mortal mind has in belief more power to harm man than the substratum, matter. A patient hears the doctor’s verdict as a criminal hears his deathsentence. The patient may seem calm under it, but he is not. His fortitude may sustain him, but his fear, which has already developed the disease that is gaining the mastery, is increased by the physician’s words.
Disease depicted
The materialistic doctor, though humane, is an artist who outlines his thought relative to disease, and then fills in his delineations with sketches from textbooks. It is better to prevent disease from forming in mortal mind afterwards to appear on the body; but to do this requires attention. The thought of disease is formed before one sees a doctor and before the doctor undertakes to dispel it by a counter-irritant, – perhaps by a blister, by the application of caustic or croton oil, or by a surgical operation. Again, giving another direction to faith, the physician prescribes drugs, until the elasticity of mortal thought haply causes a vigorous reaction upon itself, and reproduces a picture of healthy and harmonious formations.
A patient’s belief is more or less moulded and formed by his doctor’s belief in the case, even though the doctor says nothing to support his theory. His thoughts and his patient’s commingle, and the stronger thoughts rule the weaker. Hence the importance that doctors be Christian Scientists.
Mind over matter
Because the muscles of the blacksmith’s arm are strongly developed, it does not follow that exercise has produced this result or that a less used arm must be weak. If matter were the cause of action, and if muscles, without volition of mortal mind, could lift the hammer and strike the anvil, it might be thought true that hammering would enlarge the muscles. The trip-hammer is not increased in size by exercise. Why not, since muscles are as material as wood and iron? Because nobody believes that mind is producing such a result on the hammer.
Muscles are not self-acting. If mind does not move them, they are motionless. Hence the great fact that Mind alone enlarges and empowers man through its mandate,–by reason of its demand for and supply of power. Not because of muscular exercise, but by reason of the blacksmith’s faith in exercise, his arm becomes stronger.
Latent fear subdued
Mortals develop their own bodies or make them sick, according as they influence them through mortal mind. To know whether this development is produced consciously or unconsciously, is of less importance than a knowledge of the fact. The feats of the gymnast prove that latent mental fears are subdued by him. The devotion of thought to an honest achievement makes the achievement possible. Exceptions only confirm this rule, proving that failure is occasioned by a too feeble faith.
Had Blondin believed it impossible to walk the rope over Niagara’s abyss of waters, he could never have done it. His belief that he could do it gave his thoughtforces, called muscles, their flexibility and power which the unscientific might attribute to a lubricating oil. His fear must have disappeared before his power of putting resolve into action could appear.
Homer and Moses
When Homer sang of the Grecian gods, Olympus was dark, but through his verse the gods became alive in a nation’s belief. Pagan worship began with muscularity, but the law of Sinai lifted thought into the song of David. Moses advanced a nation to the worship of God in Spirit instead of matter, and illustrated the grand human capacities of being bestowed by immortal Mind.
A mortal not man
Whoever is incompetent to explain Soul would be wise not to undertake the explanation of body. Life is, always has been, and ever will be independent of matter; for life is God, and man is the idea of God, not formed materially but spiritually, and not subject to decay and dust. The Psalmist said: “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet.”
The great truth in the Science of being, that the real man was, is, and ever shall be perfect, is incontrovertible; for if man is the image, reflection, of God, he is neither inverted nor subverted, but upright and Godlike.
The suppositional antipode of divine infinite Spirit is the so-called human soul or spirit, in other words the five senses,–the flesh that warreth against Spirit. These so called material senses must yield to the infinite Spirit, named God.
St. Paul said: “For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” (I Cor. ii. 2.) Christian Science says: I am determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him glorified.
Chapter VIII – Footsteps of Truth
Remember, Lord, the reproach of Thy servants; how I do bear in my bosom the reproach of all the mighty people; wherewith Thine enemies have reproached, O Lord; wherewith they have reproached the footsteps of Thine anointed.–PSALMS.
Practical preaching
THE best sermon ever preached is Truth practised and demonstrated by the destruction of sin, sickness, and death. Knowing this and knowing too that one affection would be supreme in us and take the lead in our lives, Jesus said, “No man can serve two masters.”
We cannot build safely on false foundations. Truth makes a new creature, in whom old things pass away and “all things are become new.” Passions, selfishness, false appetites, hatred, fear, all sensuality, yield to spirituality, and the superabundance of being is on the side of God, good.
The uses of truth
We cannot fill vessels already full. They must first be emptied. Let us disrobe error. Then, when the winds of God blow, we shall not hug our tatters close about us.
The way to extract error from mortal mind is to pour in truth through flood-tides of Love. Christian perfection is won on no other basis.
Grafting holiness upon unholiness, supposing that sin can be forgiven when it is not forsaken, is as foolish as straining out gnats and swallowing camels.
The scientific unity which exists between God and man must be wrought out in life-practice, and God’s will must be universally done.
Divine study
If men would bring to bear upon the study of the Science of Mind half the faith they bestow upon the socalled pains and pleasures of material sense, they would not go on from bad to worse, until disciplined by the prison and the scaffold; but the whole human family would be redeemed through the merits of Christ, – through the perception and acceptance of Truth. For this glorious result Christian Science lights the torch of spiritual understanding.
Harmonious life-work
Outside of this Science all is mutable; but immortal man, in accord with the divine Principle of His being, God, neither sins, suffers, nor dies. The days of our pilgrimage will multiply instead of diminish, when God’s kingdom comes on earth; for the true way leads to life instead of to death, and earthly experience discloses the finity of error and the infinite capacities of Truth, in which God gives man dominion over all the earth.
Belief and practice
Our beliefs about a Supreme Being contradict the practice growing out of them. Error abounds where Truth should “much more abound.” We admit that God has almighty power, is “a very present help in trouble;” and yet we rely on a drug or hypnotism to heal disease, as if senseless matter or erring mortal mind had more power than omnipotent Spirit.
Sure reward of righteousness
Common opinion admits that a man may take cold in the act of doing good, and that this cold may produce fatal pulmonary disease; as though evil could overbear the law of Love, and check the reward for doing good. In the Science of Christianity, Mind – omnipotence–has all-power, assigns sure rewards to righteousness, and shows that matter can neither heal nor make sick, create nor destroy.
Our belief and understanding
If God were understood instead of being merely believed, this understanding would establish health. The accusation of the rabbis, “He made himself the Son of God,” was really the justification of Jesus, for to the Christian the only true spirit is Godlike. This thought incites to a more exalted worship and self-abnegation. Spiritual perception brings out the possibilities of being, destroys reliance on aught but God, and so makes man the image of his Maker in deed and in truth.
Suicide and sin
We are prone to believe either in more than one Supreme Ruler or in some power less than God. We imagine that Mind can be imprisoned in a sensuous body. When the material body has gone to ruin, when evil has overtaxed the belief of life in matter and destroyed it, then mortals believe that the deathless Principle, or Soul, escapes from matter and lives on; but this is not true. Death is not a stepping-stone to life, immortality, and bliss. The so-called sinner is a suicide. Sin kills the sinner and will continue to kill him so long as he sins. The foam and fury of illegitimate living and of fearful and doleful dying should disappear on the shore of time; then the waves of sin, sorrow, and death beat in vain. God, divine good, does not kill a man in order to give him eternal Life, for God alone is man’s life. God is at once the centre and circumference of being. It is evil that dies; good dies not.
Spirit the only intelligence and substance
All forms of error support the false conclusions that there is more than one Life; that material history is as real and living as spiritual history; that mortal error is as conclusively mental as immortal Truth; and that there are two separate, antagonistic entities and beings, two powers,–namely, Spirit and matter,–resulting in a third person (mortal man) who carries out the delusions of sin, sickness, and death.
The first power is admitted to be good, an intelligence or Mind called God. The so-called second power, evil, is the unlikeness of good. It cannot therefore be mind, though so called. The third power, mortal man, is a supposed mixture of the first and second antagonistic powers, intelligence and non-intelligence, of Spirit and matter.
Unscientific theories
Such theories are evidently erroneous. They can never stand the test of Science. Judging them by their fruits, they are corrupt. When will the ages understand the Ego, and realize only one God, one Mind or intelligence?
False and self-assertive theories have given sinners the notion that they can create what God cannot,–namely, sinful mortals in God’s image, thus usurping the name without the nature of the image or reflection of divine Mind; but in Science it can never be said that man has a mind of his own, distinct from God, the all Mind.
The belief that God lives in matter is pantheistic. The error, which says that Soul is in body, Mind is in matter, and good is in evil, must unsay it and cease from such utterances; else God will continue to be hidden from humanity, and mortals will sin without knowing that they are sinning, will lean on matter instead of Spirit, stumble with lameness, drop with drunkenness, consume with discase,–all because of their blindness, their false sense concerning God and man.
Creation perfect
When will the error of believing that there is life in matter, and that sin, sickness, and death are creations of God, be unmasked? When will it be understood that matter has neither intelligence, life, nor sensation, and that the opposite belief is the prolific source of all suffering? God created all through Mind, and made all perfect and eternal. Where then is the necessity for recreation or procreation?
Perceiving the divine image
Befogged in error (the error of believing that matter can be intelligent for good or evil), we can catch clear glimpses of God only as the mists disperse, or as they melt into such thinness that we perceive the divine image in some word or deed which indicates the true idea, – the supremacy and reality of good, the nothingness and unreality of evil.
Redemption from selfishness
When we realize that there is one Mind, the divine law of loving our neighbor as ourselves is unfolded; whereas a belief in many ruling minds hinders man’s normal drift towards the one Mind, one God, and leads human thought into opposite channels where selfishness reigns. Selfishness tips the beam of human existence towards the side of error, not towards Truth. Denial of the oneness of Mind throws our weight into the scale, not of Spirit, God, good, but of matter.
When we fully understand our relation to the Divine, we can have no other Mind but His,–no other Love, wisdom, or Truth, no other sense of Life, and no consciousness of the existence of matter or error.
Will-power unrighteous
The power of the human will should be exercised only in subordination to Truth; else it will misguide the judgment and free the lower propensities. It is the province of spiritual sense to govern man. Material, erring, human thought acts injuriously both upon the body and through it.
Will-power is capable of all evil. It can never heal the sick, for it is the prayer of the unrighteous; while the exercise of the sentiments–hope, faith, love–is the prayer of the righteous. This prayer, governed by Science instead of the senses, heals the sick.
In the scientific relation of God to man, we find that whatever blesses one blesses all, as Jesus showed with the loaves and the fishes,–Spirit, not matter, being the source of supply.
Birth and death unreal
Does God send sickness, giving the mother her child for the brief space of a few years and then taking it away by death? Is God creating anew what He has already created? The Scriptures are definite on this point, declaring that His work was finished, nothing is new to God, and that it was good.
Can there be any birth or death for man, the spiritual image and likeness of God? Instead of God sending sickness and death, He destroys them, and brings to light immortality. Omnipotent and infinite Mind made all and includes all. This Mind does not make mistakes and subsequently correct them. God does not cause man to sin, to be sick, or to die.
No evil in Spirit
There are evil beliefs, often called evil spirits; but these evils are not Spirit, for there is no evil in Spirit. Because God is Spirit, evil becomes more apparent and obnoxious proportionately as we advance spiritually, until it disappears from our lives. This fact proves our position, for every scientific statement in Christianity has its proof. Error of statement leads to error in action.
Subordination of evil
God is not the creator of an evil mind. Indeed, evil is not Mind. We must learn that evil is the awful deception and unreality of existence. Evil is not supreme; good is not helpless; nor are the so-called laws of matter primary, and the law of Spirit secondary. Without this lesson, we lose sight of the perfect Father, or the divine Principle of man.
Evident impossibilities
Body is not first and Soul last, nor is evil mightier than good. The Science of being repudiates selfevident impossibilities, such as the amalgamation of Truth and error in cause or effect. Science separates the tares and wheat in time of harvest.
One primal cause
There is but one primal cause. Therefore there can be no effect from any other cause, and there can be no reality in aught which does not proceed from this great and only cause. Sin, sickness, disease, and death belong not to the Science of being. They are the errors, which presuppose the absence of Truth, Life, or Love.
The spiritual reality is the scientific fact in all things. The spiritual fact, repeated in the action of man and the whole universe, is harmonious and is the ideal of Truth. Spiritual facts are not inverted; the opposite discord, which bears no resemblance to spirituality, is not real. The only evidence of this inversion is obtained from suppositional error, which affords no proof of God, Spirit, or of the spiritual creation. Material sense defines all things materially, and has a finite sense of the infinite.
Seemingly independent authority
The Scriptures say, “In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” What then is this seeming power, independent of God, which causes disease and cures it? What is it but an error of belief, a law of mortal mind, wrong in every sense, embracing sin, sickness, and death? It is the very antipode of immortal Mind, of Truth, and of spiritual law. It is not in accordance with the goodness of God’s character that He should make man sick, then leave man to heal himself; it is absurd to suppose that matter can both cause and cure disease, or that Spirit, God, produces disease and leaves the remedy to matter.
John Young of Edinburgh writes: “God is the father of mind, and of nothing else.” Such an utterance is “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” of human beliefs and preparing the way of Science. Let us learn of the real and eternal, and prepare for the reign of Spirit, the kingdom of heaven,–the reign and rule of universal harmony, which cannot be lost nor remain forever unseen.
Sickness as only thought
Mind, not matter, is causation. A material body only expresses a material and mortal mind. A mortal man possesses this body, and he makes it harmonious or discordant according to the images of thought impressed upon it. You embrace your body in your thought, and you should delineate upon it thoughts of health, not of sickness. You should banish all thoughts of disease and sin and of other beliefs included in matter. Man, being immortal, has a perfect indestructible life. It is the mortal belief which makes the body discordant and diseased in proportion as ignorance, fear, or human will governs mortals.
Allness of Truth
Mind, supreme over all its formations and governing them all, is the central sun of its own systems of ideas, the life and light of all its own vast creation; and man is tributary to divine Mind. The material and mortal body or mind is not the man. The world would collapse without Mind, without the intelligence which holds the winds in its grasp. Neither philosophy nor skepticism can hinder the march of the Science which reveals the supremacy of Mind. The immanent sense of Mind-power enhances the glory of Mind. Nearness, not distance, lends enchantment to this view.
Spiritual translation
The compounded minerals or aggregated substances composing the earth, the relations which constituent masses hold to each other, the magnitudes, distances, and revolutions of the celestial bodies, are of no real importance, when we remember that they all must give place to the spiritual fact by the translation of man and the universe back into Spirit. In proportion as this is done, man and the universe will be found harmonious and eternal. Material substances or mundane formations, astronomical calculations, and all the paraphernalia of speculative theories, based on the hypothesis of material law or life and intelligence resident in matter, will ultimately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite calculus of Spirit.
Spiritual sense is a conscious, constant capacity to understand God. It shows the superiority of faith by works over faith in words. Its ideas are expressed only in “new tongues;” and these are interpreted by the translation of the spiritual original into the language which human thought can comprehend.
Jesus’ disregard of matter
The Principle and proof of Christianity are discerned by spiritual sense. They are set forth in Jesus’ demonstrations, which show–by his healing the sick, casting out evils, and destroying death, “the last enemy that shall be destroyed,” his disregard of matter and its so-called laws.
Knowing that Soul and its attributes were forever manifested through man, the Master healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, feet to the lame, thus bringing to light the scientific action of the divine Mind on human minds and bodies and giving a better understanding of Soul and salvation. Jesus healed sickness and sin by one and the same metaphysical process.
Mind not mortal
The expression mortal mind is really a solecism, for Mind is immortal, and Truth pierces the error of mortality as a sunbeam penetrates the cloud. Because, in obedience to the immutable law of Spirit, this so-called mind is self-destructive, I name it mortal. Error soweth the wind and reapeth the whirlwind.
Matter mindless
What is termed matter, being unintelligent, cannot say, “I suffer, I die, I am sick, or I am well.” It is the socalled mortal mind which voices this and appears to itself to make good its claim. To mortal sense, sin and suffering are real, but immortal sense includes no evil nor pestilence. Because immortal sense has no error of sense, it has no sense of error; there fore it is without a destructive element.
If brain, nerves, stomach, are intelligent,–if they talk to us, tell us their condition, and report how they feel, then Spirit and matter, Truth and error, commingle and produce sickness and health, good and evil, life and death; and who shall say whether Truth or error is the greater?
Matter sensationless
The sensations of the body must either be the sensations of a so-called mortal mind or of matter. Nerves are not mind. Is it not provable that Mind is not mortal and that matter has no sensation? Is it not equally true that matter does not appear in the spiritual understanding of being? The sensation of sickness and the impulse to sin seem to obtain in mortal mind. When a tear starts, does not this so-called mind produce the effect seen in the lachrymal gland? Without mortal mind, the tear could not appear; and this action shows the nature of all so-called material cause and effect. It should no longer be said in Israel that “the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Sympathy with error should disappear. The transfer of the thoughts of one erring mind to another, Science renders impossible.
Nerves painless
If it is true that nerves have sensation, that matter has intelligence, that the material organism causes the eyes to see and the ears to hear, then, when the body is dematerialized, these faculties must be lost, for their immortality is not in Spirit; whereas the fact is that only through dematerialization and spiritualization of thought can these faculties be conceived of as immortal.
Nerves are not the source of pain or pleasure. We suffer or enjoy in our dreams, but this pain or pleasure is not communicated through a nerve. A tooth which has been extracted sometimes aches again in belief, and the pain seems to be in its old place. A limb which has been amputated has continued in belief to pain the owner. If the sensation of pain in the limb can return, can be prolonged, why cannot the limb reappear?
Why need pain, rather than pleasure, come to this mortal sense? Because the memory of pain is more vivid than the memory of pleasure. I have seen an unwitting attempt to scratch the end of a finger which had been cut off for months. When the nerve is gone, which we say was the occasion of pain, and the pain still remains, it proves sensation to be in the mortal mind, not in matter. Reverse the process; take away this so-called mind instead of a piece of the flesh, and the nerves have no sensation.
Human falsities
Mortals have a modus of their own, undirected and unsustained by God. They produce a rose through seed and soil, and bring the rose into contact with the olfactory nerves that they may smell it. In legerdemain and credulous frenzy, mortals believe that unseen spirits produce the flowers. God alone makes and clothes the lilies of the field, and this He does by means of Mind, not matter.
No miracles in Mind-methods
Because all the methods of Mind are not understood, we say the lips or hands must move in order to convey thought, that the undulations of the air convey sound, and possibly that other methods involve so-called miracles. The realities of being, its normal action, and the origin of all things are unseen to mortal sense; whereas the unreal and imitative movements of mortal belief, which would reverse the immortal modus and action, are styled the real. Whoever contradicts this mortal mind supposition of reality is called a deceiver, or is said to be deceived. Of a man it has been said, “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he;” hence as a man spiritually understandeth, so is he in truth.
Good indefinable
Mortal mind conceives of something as either liquid or solid, and then classifies it materially. Immortal and spiritual facts exist apart from this mortal and material conception. God, good, is self-existent and self-expressed, though indefinable as a whole. Every step towards goodness is a departure from materiality, and is a tendency towards God, Spirit. Material theories partially paralyze this attraction towards infinite and eternal good by an opposite attraction towards the finite, temporary, and discordant. Sound is a mental impression made on mortal belief. The ear does not really hear. Divine Science reveals sound as communicated through the senses of Soul through spiritual understanding.
Music, rhythm of head and heart
Mozart experienced more than he expressed. The rapture of his grandest symphonies was never heard. He was a musician beyond what the world knew. This was even more strikingly true of Beet- hoven, who was so long hopelessly deaf. Mental melodies and strains of sweetest music supersede conscious sound. Music is the rhythm of head and heart. Mortal mind is the harp of many strings, discoursing either discord or harmony according as the hand, which sweeps over it, is human or divine.
Before human knowledge dipped to its depths into a false sense of things,–into belief in material origins which discard the one Mind and true source of being, it is possible that the impressions from Truth were as distinct as sound, and that they came as sound to the primitive prophets. If the medium of hearing is wholly spiritual, it is normal and indestructible.
If Enoch’s perception had been confined to the evidence before his material senses, he could never have “walked with God,” nor been guided into the demonstration of life eternal.
Adam and the senses
Adam, represented in the Scriptures as formed from dust, is an object-lesson for the human mind. The material senses, like Adam, originate in matter and return to dust,–are proved non-intelligent. They go out as they came in, for they are still the error, not the truth of being. When it is learned that the spiritual sense, and not the material, conveys the impressions of Mind to man, then being will be understood and found to be harmonious.
Idolatrous illusions
We bow down to matter, and entertain finite thoughts of God like the pagan idolater. Mortals are inclined to fear and to obey what they consider a material body more than they do a spiritual God. All material knowledge, like the original “tree of knowledge,” multiplies their pains, for mortal illusions would rob God, slay man, and meanwhile would spread their table with cannibal tidbits and give thanks.
The senses of Soul
How transient a sense is mortal sight, when a wound on the retina may end the power of light and lens! But the real sight or sense is not lost. Neither age nor accident can interfere with the senses of Soul, and there are no other real senses. It is evident that the body as matter has no sensation of its own, and there is no oblivion for Soul and its faculties. Spirit’s senses are with out pain, and they are forever at peace. Nothing can hide from them the harmony of all things and the might and permanence of Truth.
Real being never lost
If Spirit, Soul, could sin or be lost, then being and immortality would be lost, together with all the faculties of Mind; but being cannot be lost while God ex- ists. Soul and matter are at variance from the very necessity of their opposite natures. Mortals are unacquainted with the reality of existence, because matter and mortality do not reflect the facts of Spirit.
Spiritual vision is not subordinate to geometric altitudes. Whatever is governed by God, is never for an instant deprived of the light and might of intelligence and Life.
Light and darkness
We are sometimes led to believe that darkness is as real as light; but Science affirms darkness to be only a mortal sense of the absence of light, at the coming of which darkness loses the appearance of reality. So sin and sorrow, disease and death, are the suppositional absence of Life, God, and flee as phantoms of error before truth and love. With its divine proof, Science reverses the evidence of material sense. Every quality and condition of mortality is lost, swallowed up in immortality. Mortal man is the antipode of immortal man in origin, in existence, and in his relation to God.
Faith of Socrates
Because he understood the superiority and immortality of good, Socrates feared not the hemlock poison. Even the faith of his philosophy spurned physical timidity. Having sought man’s spiritual state, he recognized the immortality of man. The ignorance and malice of the age would have killed the venerable philosopher because of his faith in Soul and his indifference to the body.
The serpent of error
Who shall say that man is alive to-day, but may be dead to-morrow? What has touched Life, God, to such strange issues? Here theories cease, and Science unveils the mystery and solves the problem of man. Error bites the heel of truth, but cannot kill truth. Truth bruises the head of error–destroys error. Spirituality lays open siege to materialism. On which side are we fighting?
Servants and masters
The understanding that the Ego is Mind, and that there is but one Mind or intelligence, begins at once to destroy the errors of mortal sense and to supply the truth of immortal sense. This understanding makes the body harmonious; it makes the nerves, bones, brain, etc., servants, instead of masters. If man is governed by the law of divine Mind, his body is in submission to everlasting Life and Truth and Love. The great mistake of mortals is to suppose that man, God’s image and likeness, is both matter and Spirit, both good and evil.
If the decision were left to the corporeal senses, evil would appear to be the master of good, and sickness to be the rule of existence, while health would seem the exception, death the inevitable, and life a paradox. Paul asked: “What concord hath Christ with Belial?” (2 Corinthians vi. 15.)
Personal identity
When you say, “Man’s body is material,” I say with Paul: Be “willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.” Give up your material belief of mind in matter, and have but one Mind, even God; for this Mind forms its own likeness. The loss of man’s identity through the understanding which Science confers is impossible; and the notion of such a possibility is more absurd than to conclude that individual musical tones are lost in the origin of harmony.
Paul’s experience
Medical schools may inform us that the healing work of Christian Science and Paul’s peculiar Christian conversion and experience,–which prove Mind to be scientifically distinct from matter,–are indications of unnatural mental and bodily conditions, even of catalepsy and hysteria; yet if we turn to the Scriptures, what do we read? Why, this: “If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death!” and “Henceforth know we no man after the flesh!”
Fatigue is mental
That scientific methods are superior to others, is seen by their effects. When you have once conquered a diseased condition of the body through Mind, that condition never recurs, and you have won a point in Science. When mentality gives rest to the body, the next toil will fatigue you less, for you are working out the problem of being in divine metaphysics; and in proportion as you understand the control which Mind has over so-called matter, you will be able to demonstrate this control. The scientific and permanent remedy for fatigue is to learn the power of Mind over the body or any illusion of physical weariness, and so destroy this illusion, for matter cannot be weary and heavy-laden.
You say, “Toil fatigues me.” But what is this me! Is it muscle or mind? Which is tired and so speaks? Without mind, could the muscles be tired? Do the muscles talk, or do you talk for them? Matter is non intelligent. Mortal mind does the false talking, and that which affirms weariness, made that weariness.
Mind never weary
You do not say a wheel is fatigued; and yet the body is as material as the wheel. If it were not for what the human mind says of the body, the body, like the inanimate wheel, would never be weary. The consciousness of Truth rests us more than hours of repose in unconsciousness.
Coalition of sin and sickness
The body is supposed to say, “I am ill.” The reports of sickness may form a coalition with the reports of sin, and say, “I am malice, lust, appetite, envy, hate.” What renders both sin and sickness difficult of cure is, that the human mind is the sinner, disinclined to self-correction, and believing that the body can be sick independently of mortal mind and that the divine Mind has no jurisdiction over the body.
Sickness akin to sin
Why pray for the recovery of the sick, if you are without faith in God’s willingness and ability to heal them? If you do believe in God, why do you substitute drugs for the Almighty’s power, and employ means which lead only into material ways of obtaining help, instead of turning in time of need to God, divine Love, who is an ever-present help?
Treat a belief in sickness as you would sin, with sudden dismissal. Resist the temptation to believe in matter as intelligent, as having sensation or power.
The Scriptures say, “They that wait upon the Lord . . . shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” The meaning of that passage is not perverted by applying it literally to moments of fatigue, for the moral and physical are as one in their results. When we wake to the truth of being, all disease, pain, weakness, weariness, sorrow, sin, death, will be unknown, and the mortal dream will forever cease. My method of treating fatigue applies to all bodily ailments, since Mind should be, and is, supreme, absolute, and final.
Affirmation and result
In mathematics, we do not multiply when we should subtract, and then say the product is correct. No more can we say in Science that muscles give strength, that nerves give pain or pleasure, or that matter governs, and then expect that the result will be harmony. Not muscles, nerves, nor bones, but mortal mind makes the whole body “sick, and the whole heart faint;” whereas divine Mind heals.
When this is understood, we shall never affirm concerning the body what we do not wish to have manifested. We shall not call the body weak, if we would have it strong; for the belief in feebleness must obtain in the human mind before it can be made manifest on the body, and the destruction of the belief will be the removal of its effects. Science includes no rule of discord, but governs harmoniously. “The wish,” says the poet, “is ever father to the thought.”
Scientific beginning
We may hear a sweet melody, and yet misunderstand the science that governs it. Those who are healed through metaphysical Science, not comprehending the Principle of the cure, may misunderstand it, and impute their recovery to change of air or diet, not rendering to God the honor due to Him alone. Entire immunity from the belief in sin, suffering, and death may not be reached at this period, but we may look for an abatement of these evils; and this scientific beginning is in the right direction.
Hygiene ineffectual
We hear it said: ” I exercise daily in the open air. I take cold baths, in order to overcome a predisposition to take cold; and yet I have continual colds, catarrh, and cough.” Such admissions ought to open people’s eyes to the inefficacy of material hygiene, and induce sufferers to look in other directions for cause and cure.
Instinct is better than misguided reason, as even nature declares. The violet lifts her blue eye to greet the early spring. The leaves clap their hands as nature’s untired worshippers. The snowbird sings and soars amid the blasts; he has no catarrh from wet feet, and procures a summer residence with more ease than a nabob. The atmosphere of the earth, kinder than the atmosphere of mortal mind, leaves catarrh to the latter. Colds, coughs, and contagion are engendered solely by human theories.
The reflex phenomena
Mortal mind produces its own phenomena, and then charges them to something else,–like a kitten glancing into the mirror at itself and thinking it sees another kitten.
A clergyman once adopted a diet of bread and water to increase his spirituality. Finding his health failing, he gave up his abstinence, and advised others never to try dietetics for growth in grace.
Volition far-reaching
The belief that either fasting or feasting makes men better morally or physically is one of the fruits of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” concerning which God said, “Thou shalt not eat of it.” Mortal mind forms all conditions of the mortal body, and controls the stomach, bones, lungs, heart, blood, etc., as directly as the volition or will moves the mind.
Starvation and dyspepsia
I knew a person who when quite a child adopted the Graham system to cure dyspepsia. For many years, he ate only bread and vegetables, and drank noth- ing but water. His dyspepsia increasing, he decided that his diet should be more rigid, and thereafter he partook of but one meal in twenty-four hours, this meal consisting of only a thin slice of bread without water. His physician also recommended that he should not wet his parched throat until three hours after eating. He passed many weary years in hunger and weakness, almost in starvation, and finally made up his mind to die, having exhausted the skill of the doctors, who kindly informed him that death was indeed his only alternative. At this point Christian Science saved him, and he is now in perfect health without a vestige of the old complaint.
He learned that suffering and disease were the selfimposed beliefs of mortals, and not the facts of being; that God never decreed disease,–never ordained a law that fasting should be a means of health. Hence semistarvation is not acceptable to wisdom, and it is equally far from Science, in which being is sustained by God, Mind. These truths, opening his eyes, relieved his stomach, and he ate without suffering, “giving God thanks;” but he never enjoyed his food as he had imagined he would when, still the slave of matter, he thought of the fleshpots of Egypt, feeling childhood’s hunger and undisciplined by self-denial and divine Science.
Mind and stomach
This new-born understanding, that neither food nor the stomach, without the consent of mortal mind, can make one suffer, brings with it an- other lesson,–that gluttony is a sensual illusion, and that this phantasm of mortal mind disappears as we better apprehend our spiritual existence and ascend the ladder of life.
This person learned that food affects the body only as mortal mind has its material methods of working, one of which is to believe that proper food supplies nutriment and strength to the human system. He learned also that mortal mind makes a mortal body, whereas Truth regenerates this fleshly mind and feeds thought with the bread of Life.
Food had less power to help or to hurt him after he had availed himself of the fact that Mind governs man, and he also had less faith in the so-called pleasures and pains of matter. Taking less thought about what he should eat or drink, consulting the stomach less about the economy of living and God more, he recovered strength and flesh rapidly. For many years he had been kept alive, as was believed, only by the strictest adherence to hygiene and drugs, and yet he continued ill all the while. Now he dropped drugs and material hygiene, and was well.
He learned that a dyspeptic was very far from being the image and likeness of God, – far from having “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle,” if eating a bit of animal flesh could overpower him. He finally concluded that God never made a dyspeptic, while fear, hygiene, physiology, and physics had made him one, contrary to His commands.
Life only in Spirit
In seeking a cure for dyspepsia consult matter not at all, and eat what is set before you, “asking no question for conscience sake.” We must destroy the false belief that life and intelligence are in matter, and plant ourselves upon what is pure and perfect. Paul said, “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.” Sooner or later we shall learn that the fetters of man’s finite capacity are forged by the illusion that he lives in body instead of in Soul, in matter instead of in Spirit.
Soul greater than body
Matter does not express Spirit. God is infinite omnipresent Spirit. If Spirit is all and is everywhere, what and where is matter? Remember that truth is greater than error, and we cannot put the greater into the less. Soul is Spirit, and Spirit is greater than body. If Spirit were once within the body, Spirit would be finite, and therefore could not be Spirit.
The question of the ages
The question, “What is Truth,” convulses the world. Many are ready to meet this inquiry with the assurance which comes of understanding; but more are blinded by their old illusions, and try to “give it pause.” “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”
The efforts of error to answer this question by some ology are vain. Spiritual rationality and free thought accompany approaching Science, and cannot be put down. They will emancipate humanity, and supplant unscientific means and so-called laws.
Heralds of Science
Peals that should startle the slumbering thought from its erroneous dream are partially unheeded; but the last trump has not sounded, or this would not be so. Marvels, calamities, and sin will much more abound as truth urges upon mortals its resisted claims; but the awful daring of sin destroys sin, and foreshadows the triumph of truth. God will overturn, until “He come whose right it is.” Longevity is increasing and the power of sin diminishing, for the, world feels the alterative effect of truth through every pore.
As the crude footprints of the past disappear from the dissolving paths of the present, we shall better understand the Science which governs these changes, and shall plant our feet on firmer ground. Every sensuous pleasure or pain is self-destroyed through suffering. There should be painless progress, attended by life and peace instead of discord and death.
Sectarianism and opposition
In the record of nineteen centuries, there are sects many but not enough Christianity. Centuries ago religionists were ready to hail an anthropomorphic God, and array His vicegerent with pomp and splendor; but this was not the manner of truth’s appearing. Of old the cross was truth’s central sign, and it is to-day. The modern lash is less material than the Roman scourge, but it is equally as cutting. Cold disdain, stubborn resistance, opposition from church, state laws, and the press, are still the harbingers of truth’s full-orbed appearing.
A higher and more practical Christianity, demonstrating justice and meeting the needs of mortals in sickness and in health, stands at the door of this age, knocking for admission. Will you open or close the door upon this angel visitant, who cometh in the quiet of meekness, as he came of old to the patriarch at noonday?
Mental emancipation
Truth brings the elements of liberty. On its banner is the Soul-inspired motto, “Slavery is abolished.” The power of God brings deliverance to the captive. No power can withstand divine Love. What is this supposed power, which opposes itself to God?
Whence cometh it? What is it that binds man with iron shackles to sin, sickness, and death? Whatever enslaves man is opposed to the divine government. Truth makes man free.
Truth’s ordeal
You may know when first Truth leads by the fewness and faithfulness of its followers. Thus it is that the march of time bears onward freedom’s banner. The powers of this world will fight, and will command their sentinels not to let truth pass the guard until it subscribes to their systems; but Science, heeding not the pointed bayonet, marches on. There is always some tumult, but there is a rallying to truth’s standard.
Immortal sentences
The history of our country, like all history, illustrates the might of Mind, and shows human power to be proportionate to its embodiment of right thinking. A few immortal sentences, breathing the omnipotence of divine justice, have been potent to break despotic fetters and abolish the whipping-post and slave market; but oppression neither went down in blood, nor did the breath of freedom come from the cannon’s mouth. Love is the liberator.
Slavery abolished
Legally to abolish unpaid servitude in the United States was hard; but the abolition of mental slavery is a more difficult task. The despotic tendencies, inherent in mortal mind and always germinating in new forms of tyranny, must be rooted out through the action of the divine Mind.
Men and women of all climes and races are still in bondage to material sense, ignorant how to obtain their freedom. The rights of man were vindicated in a single section and on the lowest plane of human life, when African slavery was abolished in our land. That was only prophetic of further steps towards the banishment of a world-wide slavery, found on higher planes of existence and under more subtle and depraving forms.
Liberty’s crusade
The voice of God in behalf of the African slave was still echoing in our land, when the voice of the herald of this new crusade sounded the keynote of universal freedom, asking a fuller acknowledgment of the rights of man as a Son of God, demanding that the fetters of sin, sickness, and death be stricken from the human mind and that its freedom be won, not through human warfare, not with bayonet and blood, but through Christ’s divine Science.
Cramping systems
God has built a higher platform of human rights, and He has built it on diviner claims. These claims are not made through code or creed, but in demonstration of “on earth peace, good-will toward men.” Human codes, scholastic theology, material medicine and hygiene, fetter faith and spiritual understanding. Divine Science rends asunder these fetters, and man’s birthright of sole allegiance to his Maker asserts itself.
I saw before me the sick, wearing out years of servitude to an unreal master in the belief that the body governed them, rather than Mind.
House of bondage
The lame, the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the sick, the sensual, the sinner, I wished to save from the slavery of their own beliefs and from the educational systems of the Pharaohs, who to-day, as of yore, hold the children of Israel in bondage. I saw before me the awful conflict, the Red Sea and the wilderness; but I pressed on through faith in God, trusting Truth, the strong deliverer, to guide me into the land of Christian Science, where fetters fall and the rights of man are fully known and acknowledged.
Higher law ends bondage
I saw that the law of mortal belief included all error, and that, even as oppressive laws are disputed and mortals are taught their right to freedom, so the claims of the enslaving senses must be denied and superseded. The law of the divine Mind must end human bondage, or mortals will continue unaware of man’s inalienable rights and in subjection to hopeless slavery, because some public teachers permit an ignorance of divine power,–an ignorance that is the foundation of continued bondage and of human suffering.
Native freedom
Discerning the rights of man, we cannot fail to foresee the doom of all oppression. Slavery is not the legitimate state of man. God made man free. Paul said, “I was free born.” All men should be free. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” Love and Truth make free, but evil and error lead into captivity.
Standard of liberty
Christian Science raises the standard of liberty and cries: “Follow me! Escape from the bondage of sickness, sin, and death!” Jesus marked out the way. Citizens of the world, accept the “glorious liberty of the children of God,” and be free! This is your divine right. The illusion of material sense, not divine law, has bound you, entangled your free limbs, crippled your capacities, enfeebled your body, and defaced the tablet of your being.
If God had instituted material laws to govern man, disobedience to which would have made man ill, Jesus would not have disregarded those laws by healing in direct opposition to them and in defiance of all material conditions.
No fleshly heredity
The transmission of disease or of certain idiosyncrasies of mortal mind would be impossible if this great fact of being were learned,–namely, that nothing inharmonious can enter being, for Life is God. Heredity is a prolific subject for mortal belief to pin theories upon; but if we learn that nothing is real but the right, we shall have no dangerous inheritances, and fleshly ills will disappear.
God-given dominion
The enslavement of man is not legitimate. It will cease when man enters into his heritage of freedom, his God-given dominion over the material senses. Mortals will some day assert their freedom in the name of Almighty God. Then they will control their own bodies through the understanding of divine Science. Dropping their present beliefs, they will recognize harmony as the spiritual reality and discord as the material unreality.
If we follow the command of our Master, “Take no thought for your life,” we shall never depend on bodily conditions, structure, or economy, but we shall be masters of the body, dictate its terms, and form and control it with Truth.
Priestly pride humbled
There is no power apart from God. Omnipotence has all-power, and to acknowledge any other power is to dishonor God. The humble Nazarene overthrew the supposition that sin, sickness, and death have power. He proved them powerless. It should have humbled the pride of the priests, when they saw the demonstration of Christianity excel the influence of their dead faith and ceremonies.
If Mind is not the master of sin, sickness, and death, they are immortal, for it is already proved that matter has not destroyed them, but is their basis and support.
No union of opposites
We should hesitate to say that Jehovah sins or suffers; but if sin and suffering are realities of being, whence did they emanate? God made all that was made, and Mind signifies God,–infinity, not finity. Not far removed from infidelity is the belief which unites such opposites as sickness and health, holiness and unholiness, calls both the offspring of spirit, and at the same time admits that Spirit is God, – virtually declaring Him good in one instance and evil in another.
Self-constituted law
By universal consent, mortal belief has constituted itself a law to bind mortals to sickness, sin, and death. This customary belief is misnamed material law, and the individual who upholds it is mistaken in theory and in practice. The so-called law of mortal mind, conjectural and speculative, is made void by the law of immortal Mind, and false law should be trampled under foot.
Sickness from mortal mind
If God causes man to be sick, sickness must be good, and its opposite, health, must be evil, for all that He makes is good and will stand forever. If the transgression of God’s law produces sickness, it is right to be sick; and we cannot if we would, and should not if we could, annul the decrees of wisdom. It is the transgression of a belief of mortal mind, not of a law of matter nor of divine Mind, which causes the belief of sickness. The remedy is Truth, not matter,–the truth that disease is unreal.
If sickness is real, it belongs to immortality; if true, it is a part of Truth. Would you attempt with drugs, or without, to destroy a quality or condition of Truth? But if sickness and sin are illusions, the awakening from this mortal dream, or illusion, will bring us into health, holiness, and immortality. This awakening is the forever coming of Christ, the advanced appearing of Truth, which casts out error and heals the sick. This is the salvation which comes through God, the divine Principle, Love, as demonstrated by Jesus.
God never inconsistent
It would be contrary to our highest ideas of God to suppose Him capable of first arranging law and causation so as to bring about certain evil results, and then punishing the helpless victims of His volition for doing what they could not avoid doing. Good is not, cannot be, the author of experimental sins. God, good, can no more produce sickness than goodness can cause evil and health occasion disease.
Mental narcotics
Does wisdom make blunders which must afterwards be rectified by man? Does a law of God produce sickness, and can man put that law under his feet by healing sickness? According to Holy Writ, the sick are never really healed by drugs, hygiene, or any material method. These merely evade the question. They are soothing syrups to put children to sleep, satisfy mortal belief, and quiet fear.
The true healing
We think that we are healed when a disease disappears, though it is liable to reappear; but we are never thoroughly healed until the liability to be ill is removed. So-called mortal mind or the mind of mortals being the remote, predisposing, and the exciting cause of all suffering, the cause of disease must be obliterated through Christ in divine Science, or the so-called physical senses will get the victory.
Destruction of all evil
Unless an ill is rightly met and fairly overcome by Truth, the ill is never conquered. If God destroys not sin, sickness, and death, they are not destroyed in the mind of mortals, but seem to this so-called mind to be immortal. What God cannot do, man need not attempt. If God heals not the sick, they are not healed, for no lesser power equals the infinite All-power; but God, Truth, Life, Love, does heal the sick through the prayer of the righteous.
If God makes sin, if good produces evil, if truth results in error, then Science and Christianity are helpless; but there are no antagonistic powers nor laws, spiritual or material, creating and governing man through perpetual warfare. God is not the author of mortal discords. Therefore we accept the conclusion that discords have only a fabulous existence, are mortal beliefs which divine Truth and Love destroy.
Superiority to sickness and sin
To hold yourself superior to sin, because God made you superior to it and governs man, is true wisdom. To fear sin is to misunderstand the power of Love and the divine Science of being in man’s relation to God,–to doubt His government and distrust His omnipotent care. To hold yourself superior to sickness and death is equally wise, and is in accordance with divine Science. To fear them is impossible, when you fully apprehend God and know that they are no part of His creation.
Man, governed by his Maker, having no other Mind, planted on the Evangelist’s statement that “all things were made by Him [the Word of God]; and without Him was not anything made that was made,”–can triumph over sin, sickness, and death.
Denials of divine power
Many theories relative to God and man neither make man harmonious nor God lovable. The beliefs we commonly entertain about happiness and life afford no scatheless and permanent evidence of either. Security for the claims of harmonious and eternal being is found only in divine Science.
Scripture informs us that “with God all things are possible,” – all good is possible to Spirit; but our prevalent theories practically deny this, and make healing possible only through matter. These theories must be untrue, for the Scripture is true. Christianity is not false, but religions which contradict its Principle are false.
In our age Christianity is again demonstrating the power of divine Principle, as it did over nineteen hundred years ago, by healing the sick and triumphing over death. Jesus never taught that drugs, food, air, and exercise could make a man healthy, or that they could destroy human life; nor did he illustrate these errors by his practice. He referred man’s harmony to Mind, not to matter, and never tried to make of none effect the sentence of God, which sealed God’s condemnation of sin, sickness, and death.
Signs following
In the sacred sanctuary of Truth are voices of solemn import, but we heed them not. It is only when the so-called pleasures and pains of sense pass away in our lives, that we find unquestionable signs of the burial of error and the resurrection to spiritual life.
Profession and proof
There is neither place nor opportunity in Science for error of any sort. Every day makes its demands upon us for higher proofs rather than professions of Christian power. These proofs consist solely in the destruction of sin, sickness, and death by the power of Spirit, as Jesus destroyed them. This is an element of progress, and progress is the law of God, whose law demands of us only what we can certainly fulfil.
Perfection gained slowly
In the midst of imperfection, perfection is seen and acknowledged only by degrees. The ages must slowly work up to perfection. How long it must be before we arrive at the demonstration of scientific being, no man knoweth,–not even “the Son but the Father;” but the false claim of error continues its delusions until the goal of goodness is assiduously earned and won.
Christ’s mission
Already the shadow of His right hand rests upon the hour. Ye who can discern the face of the sky,–the sign material,–how much more should ye discern the sign mental, and compass the destruction of sin and sickness by overcoming the thoughts which produce them, and by understanding the spiritual idea which corrects and destroys them. To reveal this truth was our Master’s mission to all mankind, including the hearts which rejected him.
Efficacy of truth
When numbers have been divided according to a fixed rule, the quotient is not more unquestionable than the scientific tests I have made of the effects of truth upon the sick. The counter fact relative to any disease is required to cure it. The utterance of truth is designed to rebuke and destroy error. Why should truth not be efficient in sickness, which is solely the result of inharmony?
Spiritual draughts heal, while material lotions interfere with truth, even as ritualism and creed hamper spirituality. If we trust matter, we distrust Spirit.
Crumbs of comfort
Whatever inspires with wisdom, Truth, or Love–be it song, sermon, or Science–blesses the human family with crumbs of comfort from Christ’s table feeding the hungry and giving living waters to the thirsty.
Hospitality to health and good
We should become more familiar with good than with evil, and guard against false beliefs as watchfully as we bar our doors against the approach of thieves and murderers. We should love our enemies and help them on the basis of the Golden Rule; but avoid casting pearls before those who trample them under foot, thereby robbing both themselves and others.
Cleansing the mind
If mortals would keep proper ward over mortal mind, the brood of evils which infest it would be cleared out. We must begin with this so-called mind and empty it of sin and sickness, or sin and sickness will never cease. The present codes of human systems disappoint the weary searcher after a divine theology, adequate to the right education of human thought.
Sin and disease must be thought before they can be manifested. You must control evil thoughts in the first instance, or they will control you in the second. Jesus declared that to look with desire on forbidden objects was to break a moral precept. He laid great stress on the action of the human mind, unseen to the senses.
Evil thoughts and aims reach no farther and do no more harm than one’s belief permits. Evil thoughts, lusts, and malicious purposes cannot go forth, like wandering pollen, from one human mind to another, finding unsuspected lodgment, if virtue and truth build a strong defence. Better suffer a doctor infected with smallpox to attend you than to be treated mentally by one who does not obey the requirements of divine Science.
Teachers’ functions
The teachers of schools and the readers in churches should be selected with as direct reference to their morals as to their learning or their correct reading. Nurseries of character should be strongly garrisoned with virtue. School-examinations are one-sided; it is not so much academic education, as a moral and spiritual culture, which lifts one higher. The pure and uplifting thoughts of the teacher, constantly imparted to pupils, will reach higher than the heavens of astronomy; while the debased and unscrupulous mind, though adorned with gems of scholarly attainment, will degrade the characters it should inform and elevate.
Physicians’ privilege
Physicians, whom the sick employ in their helplessness, should be models of virtue. They should be wise spiritual guides to health and hope. To the tremblers on the brink of death, who understand not the divine Truth which is Life and perpetuates being, physicians should be able to teach it. Then when the soul is willing and the flesh weak, the patient’s feet may be planted on the rock Christ Jesus, the true idea of spiritual power.
Clergymen’s duty
Clergymen, occupying the watchtowers of the world, should uplift the standard of Truth. They should so raise their hearers spiritually, that their listeners will love to grapple with a new, right idea and broaden their concepts. Love of Christianity, rather than love of popularity, should stimulate clerical labor and progress. Truth should emanate from the pulpit, but never be strangled there. A special privilege is vested in the ministry. How shall it be used? Sacredly, in the interests of humanity, not of sect.
Is it not professional reputation and emolument rather than the dignity of God’s laws, which many leaders seek? Do not inferior motives induce the infuriated attacks on individuals, who reiterate Christ’s teachings in support of his proof by example that the divine Mind heals sickness as well as sin?
A mother’s responsibility
A mother is the strongest educator, either for or against crime. Her thoughts form the embryo of another mortal mind, and unconsciously mould it, either after a model odious to herself or through divine influence, “according to the pattern showed to thee in the mount.” Hence the importance of Christian Science, from which we learn of the one Mind and of the availability of good as the remedy for every woe.
Children’s tractability
Children should obey their parents; insubordination is an evil, blighting the buddings of self-government. Parents should teach their children at the earliest possible period the truths of health and holiness. Children are more tractable than adults, and learn more readily to love the simple verities that will make them happy and good.
Jesus loved little children because of their freedom from wrong and their receptiveness of right. While age is halting between two opinions or battling with false beliefs, youth makes easy and rapid strides towards Truth.
A little girl, who had occasionally listened to my explanations, badly wounded her finger. She seemed not to notice it. On being questioned about it she answered ingenuously, “There is no sensation in matter.” Bounding off with laughing eyes, she presently added, “Mamma, my finger is not a bit sore.”
Soil and seed
It might have been months or years before her parents would have laid aside their drugs, or reached the mental height their little daughter so naturally attained. The more stubborn beliefs and theories of parents often choke the good seed in the minds of themselves and their offspring. Superstition, like “the fowls of the air,” snatches away the good seed before it has sprouted.
Teaching children
Children should be taught the Truth-cure, Christian Science, among their first lessons, and kept from discussing or entertaining theories or thoughts about sickness. To prevent the experience of error and its sufferings, keep out of the minds of your children either sinful or diseased thoughts. The latter should be excluded on the same principle as the former. This makes Christian Science early available.
Deluded invalids
Some invalids are unwilling to know the facts or to hear about the fallacy of matter and its supposed laws. They devote themselves a little longer to their material gods, cling to a belief in the life and intelligence of matter, and expect this error to do more for them than they are willing to admit the only living and true God can do. Impatient at your explanation, unwilling to investigate the Science of Mind which would rid them of their complaints, they hug false beliefs and suffer the delusive consequences.
Patient waiting
Motives and acts are not rightly valued before they are understood. It is well to wait till those whom you would benefit are ready for the blessing, for Science is working changes in personal character as well as in the material universe.
To obey the Scriptural command, “Come out from among them, and be ye separate,” is to incur society’s frown; but this frown, more than flatteries, enables one to be Christian. Losing her crucifix, the Roman Catholic girl said, “I have nothing left but Christ.” “If God be for us, who can be against us?”
Unimproved opportunities
To fall away from Truth in times of persecution, shows that we never understood Truth. From out the bridal chamber of wisdom there will come the warning, “I know you not.” Unimproved opportunities will rebuke us when we attempt to claim the benefits of an experience we have not made our own, try to reap the harvest we have not sown, and wish to enter unlawfully into the labors of others. Truth often remains unsought, until we seek this remedy for human woe because we suffer severely from error.
Attempts to conciliate society and so gain dominion over mankind, arise from worldly weakness. He who leaves all for Christ forsakes popularity and gains Christianity.
Society and intolerance
Society is a foolish juror, listening only to one side of the case. Justice often comes too late to secure a verdict. People with mental work before them have no time for gossip about false law or testimony. To reconstruct timid justice and place the fact above the falsehood, is the work of time.
The cross is the central emblem of history. It is the lodestar in the demonstration of Christian healing,–the demonstration by which sin and sickness are destroyed. The sects, which endured the lash of their predecessors, in their turn lay it upon those who are in advance of creeds.
Right views of humanity
Take away wealth, fame, and social organizations, which weigh not one jot in the balance of God, and we get clearer views of Principle. Break up cliques, level wealth with honesty, let worth be judged according to wisdom, and we get better views of humanity.
The wicked man is not the ruler of his upright neighbor. Let it be understood that success in error is defeat in Truth. The watchword of Christian Science is Scriptural: “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts.”
Standpoint revealed
To ascertain our progress, we must learn where our affections are placed and whom we acknowledge and obey as God. If divine Love is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us, matter is then submitting to Spirit. The objects we pursue and the spirit we manifest reveal our standpoint, and show what we are winning.
Antagonistic sources
Mortal mind is the acknowledged seat of human motives. It forms material concepts and produces every discordant action of the body. If action proceeds from the divine Mind, action is harmo- nious. If it comes from erring mortal mind, it is discordant and ends in sin, sickness, death. Those two opposite sources never mingle in fount or stream. The perfect Mind sends forth perfection, for God is Mind. Imperfect mortal mind sends forth its own resemblances, of which the wise man said, “All is vanity.”
Some lessons from nature
Nature voices natural, spiritual law and divine Love, but human belief misinterprets nature. Arctic regions, sunny tropics, giant hills, winged winds, mighty billows, verdant vales, festive flowers, and glorious heavens,–all point to Mind, the spiritual intelligence they reflect. The floral apostles are hieroglyphs of Deity. Suns and planets teach grand lessons. The stars make night beautiful, and the leaflet turns naturally towards the light.
Perpetual motions
In the order of Science, in which the Principle is above what it reflects, all is one grand concord. Change this statement, suppose Mind to be governed by matter or Soul in body, and you lose the keynote of being, and there is continual discord. Mind is perpetual motion. Its symbol is the sphere. The rotations and revolutions of the universe of Mind go on eternally.
Progress demanded
Mortals move onward towards good or evil as time glides on. If mortals are not progressive, past failures will be repeated until all wrong work is effaced or rectified. If at present satisfied with wrong-doing, we must learn to loathe it. If at present content with idleness, we must become dissatisfied with it. Remember that mankind must sooner or later, either by suffering or by Science, be convinced of the error that is to be overcome.
In trying to undo the errors of sense one must pay fully and fairly the utmost farthing, until all error is finally brought into subjection to Truth. The divine method of paying sin’s wages involves unwinding one’s snarls and learning from experience how to divide between sense and Soul.
“Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.” He, who knows God’s will or the demands of divine Science and obeys them, incurs the hostility of envy; and he who refuses obedience to God, is chastened by Love.
The doom of sin
Sensual treasures are laid up “where moth and rust doth corrupt.” Mortality is their doom. Sin breaks in upon them, and carries off their fleeting joys. The sensualist’s affections are as imaginary, whimsical, and unreal as his pleasures. Falsehood, envy, hypocrisy, malice, hate, revenge, and so forth, steal away the treasures of Truth. Stripped of its coverings, what a mocking spectacle is sin!
Spirit transforms
The Bible teaches transformation of the body by the renewal of Spirit. Take away the spiritual signification of Scripture, and that compilation can do no more for mortals than can moonbeams to melt a river of ice. The error of the ages is preaching without practice. The substance of all devotion is the reflection and demonstration of divine Love, healing sickness and destroying sin. Our Master said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”
One’s aim, a point beyond faith, should be to find the footsteps of Truth, the way to health and holiness. We should strive to reach the Horeb height where God is revealed; and the corner-stone of all spiritual building is purity. The baptism of Spirit, washing the body of all the impurities of flesh, signifies that the pure in heart see God and are approaching spiritual Life and its demonstration.
Spiritual baptism
It is “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” than for sinful beliefs to enter the kingdom of heaven, eternal harmony. Through repentance, spiritual baptism, and regeneration, mortals put off their material beliefs and false individuality. It is only a question of time when “they shall all know Me [God], from the least of them unto the greatest.” Denial of the claims of matter is a great step towards the joys of Spirit, towards human freedom and the final triumph over the body.
The one only way
There is but one way to heaven, harmony, and Christ in divine Science shows us this way. It is to know no other reality – to have no other consciousness of life – than good, God and His reflection, and to rise superior to the so-called pain and pleasure of the senses.
Self-love is more opaque than a solid body. In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error, – self-will, self-justification, and self-love, which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death.
Divided vestments
The vesture of Life is Truth. According to the Bible, the facts of being are commonly misconstrued, for it is written: “They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots.” The divine Science of man is woven into one web of consistency without seam or rent. Mere speculation or superstition appropriates no part of the divine vesture, while inspiration restores every part of the Christly garment of righteousness.
The finger-posts of divine Science show the way our Master trod, and require of Christians the proof which he gave, instead of mere profession. We may hide spiritual ignorance from the world, but we can never succeed in the Science and demonstration of spiritual good through ignorance or hypocrisy.
Ancient and modern miracles
The divine Love, which made harmless the poisonous viper, which delivered men from the boiling oil, from the fiery furnace, from the jaws of the lion, can heal the sick in every age and triumph over sin and death. It crowned the demonstrations of Jesus with unsurpassed power and love. But the same “Mind . . . which was also in Christ Jesus” must always accompany the letter of Science in order to confirm and repeat the ancient demonstrations of prophets and apostles. That those wonders are not more commonly repeated to-day, arises not so much from lack of desire as from lack of spiritual growth.
Mental telegraphy
The clay cannot reply to the potter. The head, heart, lungs, and limbs do not inform us that they are dizzy, diseased, consumptive, or lame. If this in- formation is conveyed, mortal mind conveys it. Neither immortal and unerring Mind nor matter, the inanimate substratum of mortal mind, can carry on such telegraphy; for God is “of purer eyes than to behold evil,” and matter has neither intelligence nor sensation.
Annihilation of error
Truth has no consciousness of error. Love has no sense of hatred. Life has no partnership with death. Truth, Life, and Love are a law of annihilation to everything unlike themselves, because they declare nothing except God.
Deformity and perfection
Sickness, sin, and death are not the fruits of Life. They are inharmonies which Truth destroys. Perfection does not animate imperfection. Inasmuch as God is good and the fount of all being, He does not produce moral or physical deformity; therefore such deformity is not real, but is illusion, the mirage of error. Divine Science reveals these grand facts. On their basis Jesus demonstrated Life, never fearing nor obeying error in any form.
If we were to derive all our conceptions of man from what is seen between the cradle and the grave, happiness and goodness would have no abiding-place in man, and the worms would rob him of the flesh; but Paul writes: “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”
Man never less than man
Man undergoing birth, maturity, and decay is like the beasts and vegetables,–subject to laws of decay. If man were dust in his earliest stage of existence, we might admit the hypothesis that he returns eventually to his primitive condition; but man was never more nor less than man.
If man flickers out in death or springs from matter into being, there must be an instant when God is without His entire manifestation,–when there is no full reflection of the infinite Mind.
Man not evolved
Man in Science is neither young nor old. He has neither birth nor death. He is not a beast, a vegetable, nor a migratory mind. He does not pass from matter to Mind, from the mortal to the immortal, from evil to good, or from good to evil. Such admissions cast us headlong into darkness and dogma. Even Shakespeare’s poetry pictures age as infancy, as helplessness and decadence, instead of assigning to man the everlasting grandeur and immortality of development, power, and prestige.
The error of thinking that we are growing old, and the benefits of destroying that illusion, are illustrated in a sketch from the history of an English woman, published in the London medical magazine called The Lancet.
Perpetual youth
Disappointed in love in her early years, she became insane and lost all account of time. Believing that she was still living in the same hour which parted her from her lover, taking no note of years, she stood daily before the window watching for her lover’s coming. In this mental state she remained young. Having no consciousness of time, she literally grew no older. Some American travellers saw her when she was seventy-four, and supposed her to be a young woman. She had no care-lined face, no wrinkles nor gray hair, but youth sat gently on cheek and brow. Asked to guess her age, those unacquainted with her history conjectured that she must be under twenty.
This instance of youth preserved furnishes a useful hint, upon which a Franklin might work with more certainty than when he coaxed the enamoured lightning from the clouds. Years had not made her old, because she had taken no cognizance of passing time nor thought of herself as growing old. The bodily results of her belief that she was young manifested the influence of such a belief. She could not age while believing herself young, for the mental state governed the physical.
Impossibilities never occur. One instance like the foregoing proves it possible to be young at seventy-four; and the primary of that illustration makes it plain that decrepitude is not according to law, nor is it a necessity of nature, but an illusion.
Man reflects God
The infinite never began nor will it ever end. Mind and its formations can never be annihilated. Man is not a pendulum, swinging between evil and good, joy and sorrow, sickness and health, life and death. Life and its faculties are not measured by calendars. The perfect and immortal are the eternal likeness of their Maker. Man is by no means a material germ rising from the imperfect and endeavoring to reach Spirit above his origin. The stream rises no higher than its source.
The measurement of life by solar years robs youth and gives ugliness to age. The radiant sun of virtue and truth coexists with being. Manhood is its eternal noon, undimmed by a declining sun. As the physical and material, the transient sense of beauty fades, the radiance of Spirit should dawn upon the enraptured sense with bright and imperishable glories.
Undesirable records
Never record ages. Chronological data are no part of the vast forever. Time-tables of birth and death are so many conspiracies against manhood and womanhood. Except for the error of measuring and limiting all that is good and beautiful, man would enjoy more than threescore years and ten and still maintain his vigor, freshness, and promise. Man, governed by immortal Mind, is always beautiful and grand. Each succeeding year unfolds wisdom, beauty, and holiness.
True life eternal
Life is eternal. We should find this out, and begin the demonstration thereof. Life and goodness are immortal. Let us then shape our views of existence into loveliness, freshness, and continuity, rather than into age and blight.
Acute and chronic beliefs reproduce their own types.
The acute belief of physical life comes on at a remote period, and is not so disastrous as the chronic belief.
Eyes and teeth renewed
I have seen age regain two of the elements it had lost, sight and teeth. A woman of eighty-five, whom I knew, had a return of sight. Another woman at ninety had new teeth, incisors, cuspids, bicuspids, and one molar. One man at sixty had retained his full set of upper and lower teeth without a decaying cavity.
Eternal beauty
Beauty, as well as truth, is eternal; but the beauty of material things passes away, fading and fleeting as mortal belief. Custom, education, and fashion form the transient standards of mortals. Immortality, exempt from age or decay, has a glory of its own,–the radiance of Soul. Immortal men and women are models of spiritual sense, drawn by perfect Mind and reflecting those higher conceptions of loveliness which transcend all material sense.
The divine loveliness
Comeliness and grace are independent of matter. Being possesses its qualities before they are perceived humanly. Beauty is a thing of life, which dwells forever in the eternal Mind and reflects the charms of His goodness in expression, form, outline, and color. It is Love which paints the petal with myriad hues, glances in the warm sunbeam, arches the cloud with the bow of beauty, blazons the night with starry gems, and covers earth with loveliness. The embellishments of the person are poor substitutes for the charms of being, shining resplendent and eternal over age and decay. The recipe for beauty is to have less illusion and more Soul, to retreat from the belief of pain or pleasure in the body into the unchanging calm and glorious freedom of spiritual harmony.
Love’s endowment
Love never loses sight of loveliness. Its halo rests upon its object. One marvels that a friend can ever seem less than beautiful. Men and women of riper years and larger lessons ought to ripen into health and immortality, instead of lapsing into darkness or gloom. Immortal Mind feeds the body with supernal freshness and fairness, supplying it with beautiful images of thought and destroying the woes of sense which each day brings to a nearer tomb.
Mental sculpture
The sculptor turns from the marble to his model in order to perfect his conception. We are all sculptors, working at various forms, moulding and chiseling thought. What is the model before mortal mind? Is it imperfection, joy, sorrow, sin, suffering? Have you accepted the mortal model? Are you reproducing it? Then you are haunted in your work by vicious sculptors and hideous forms. Do you not hear from all mankind of the imperfect model? The world is holding it before your gaze continually. The result is that you are liable to follow those lower patterns, limit your lifework, and adopt into your experience the angular outline and deformity of matter models.
Perfect models
To remedy this, we must first turn our gaze in the right direction, and then walk that way. We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives. Let unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love–the kingdom of heaven–reign within us, and sin, disease, and death will diminish until they finally disappear.
Let us accept Science, relinquish all theories based on sense-testimony, give up imperfect models and illusive ideals; and so let us have one God, one Mind, and that one perfect, producing His own models of excellence.
Renewed selfhood
Let the “male and female” of God’s creating appear. Let us feel the divine energy of Spirit, bringing us into newness of life and recognizing no mortal nor material power as able to destroy. Let us rejoice that we are subject to the divine “powers that be.” Such is the true Science of being. Any other theory of Life, or God, is delusive and mythological.
Mind is not the author of matter, and the creator of ideas is not the creator of illusions. Either there is no omnipotence, or omnipotence is the only power. God is the infinite, and infinity never began, will never end, and includes nothing unlike God. Whence then is soulless matter?
Illusive dreams
Life is, like Christ, “the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever.” Organization and time have nothing to do with Life. You say, “I dreamed last night.” What a mistake is that! The I is Spirit. God never slumbers, and His likeness never dreams. Mortals are the Adam dreamers.
Sleep and apath are phases of the dream that life, substance, and intelligence are material. The mortal nightdream is sometimes nearer the fact of being than are the thoughts of mortals when awake. The night-dream has less matter as its accompaniment. It throws off some material fetters. It falls short of the skies, but makes its mundane flights quite ethereal.
Philosophical blunders
Man is the reflection of Soul. He is the direct opposite of material sensation, and there is but one Ego. We run into error when we divide Soul into souls, multiply Mind into minds and suppose error to be mind, then mind to be in matter and matter to be a lawgiver, unintelligence to act like intelligence, and mortality to be the matrix of immortality.
Spirit the one Ego
Mortal existence is a dream; mortal existence has no real entity, but saith “It is I.” Spirit is the Ego which never dreams, but understands all things; which never errs, and is ever conscious; which never believes, but knows; which is never born and never dies. Spiritual man is the likeness of this Ego. Man is not God, but like a ray of light which comes from the sun, man, the outcome of God, reflects God.
Mortal existence a dream
Mortal body and mind are one, and that one is called man; but a mortal is not man, for man is immortal. A mortal may be weary or pained, enjoy or suffer, according to the dream he entertains in sleep. When that dream vanishes, the mortal finds himself experiencing none of these dream-sensations. To the observer, the body lies listless, undisturbed, and sensationless, and the mind seems to be absent.
Now I ask, Is there any more reality in the waking dream of mortal existence than in the sleeping dream? There cannot be, since whatever appears to be a mortal man is a mortal dream. Take away the mortal mind, and matter has no more sense as a man than it has as a tree. But the spiritual, real man is immortal.
Upon this stage of existence goes on the dance of mortal mind. Mortal thoughts chase one another like snowflakes, and drift to the ground. Science reveals Life as not being at the mercy of death, nor will Science admit that happiness is ever the sport of circumstance.
Error self-destroyed
Error is not real, hence it is not more imperative as it hastens towards self-destruction. The so-called belief of mortal mind apparent as an abscess should not grow more painful before it suppurates neither should a fever become more severe before it ends.
Illusion of death
Fright is so great at certain stages of mortal belief as to drive belief into new paths. In the illusion of death, mortals wake to the knowledge of two facts: (1) that they are not dead; (2) that they have but passed the portals of a new belief. Truth works out the nothingness of error in just these ways. Sickness, as well as sin, is an error that Christ, Truth, alone can destroy.
Mortal mind’s disappearance
We must learn how mankind govern the body, whether through faith in hygiene, in drugs, or in willpower. We should learn whether they govern the body through a belief in the necessity of sickness and death, sin and pardon, or govern it from the higher understanding that the divine Mind makes perfect, acts upon the so-called human mind through truth, leads the human mind to relinquish all error, to find the divine Mind to be the only Mind, and the healer of sin, disease, death. This process of higher spiritual understanding improves mankind until error disappears, and nothing is left which deserves to perish or to be punished.
Spiritual ignorance
Ignorance, like intentional wrong, is not Science. Ignorance must be seen and corrected before we can attain harmony. Inharmonious beliefs, which rob Mind, calling it matter, and deify their own notions, imprison themselves in what they create.
They are at war with Science, and as our Master said, “If a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.”
Human ignorance of Mind and of the recuperative energies of Truth occasions the only skepticism regarding the pathology and theology of Christian Science.
Eternal man recognized
When false human beliefs learn even a little of their own falsity, they begin to disappear. A knowledge of error and of its operations must precede that understanding of Truth which destroys error, until the entire mortal, material error finally disappears, and the eternal verity, man created by and of Spirit, is understood and recognized as the true likeness of his Maker.
The false evidence of material sense contrasts strikingly with the testimony of Spirit. Material sense lifts its voice with the arrogance of reality and says:
Testimony of sense
I am wholly dishonest, and no man knoweth it. I can cheat, lie, commit adultery, rob, murder, and I elude detection by smooth-tongued villainy. Animal in propensity, deceitful in sentiment, fraudulent in purpose, I mean to make my short span of life one gala day. What a nice thing is sin! How sin succeeds, where the good purpose waits! The world is my kingdom. I am enthroned in the gorgeousness of matter. But a touch, an accident, the law of God, may at any moment annihilate my peace, for all my fancied joys are fatal. Like bursting lava, I expand but to my own despair, and shine with the resplendency of consuming fire.
Spirit, bearing opposite testimony, saith:
Testimony of Soul
I am Spirit. Man, whose senses are spiritual, is my likeness. He reflects the infinite understanding, for I am Infinity. The beauty of holiness, the perfection of being, imperishable glory,–all are Mine, for I am God. I give immortality to man, for I am Truth. I include and impart all bliss, for I am Love. I give life, without beginning and without end, for I am Life. I am supreme and give all, for I am Mind. I am the substance of all, because I AM THAT I AM.
Heaven-bestowed prerogative
I hope, dear reader, I am leading you into the understanding of your divine rights, your heaven-bestowed harmony,–that, as you read, you see there is no cause (outside of erring, mortal, material sense which is not power) able to make you sick or sinful; and I hope that you are conquering this false sense. Knowing the falsity of so-called material sense, you can assert your prerogative to overcome the belief in sin, disease, or death.
Right endeavor possible
If you believe in and practise wrong knowingly, you can at once change your course and do right. Matter can make no opposition to right endeavors against sin or sickness, for matter is inert, mindless. Also, if you believe yourself diseased, you can alter this wrong belief and action without hindrance from the body. Do not believe in any supposed necessity for sin, disease, or death, knowing (as you ought to know) that God never requires obedience to a so-called material law, for no such law exists. The belief in sin and death is destroyed by the law of God, which is the law of Life instead of death, of harmony instead of discord, of Spirit instead of the flesh.
Patience and final perfection
The divine demand, “Be ye therefore perfect,” is scientific, and the human footsteps leading to perfection are indispensable. Individuals are consistent who, watching and praying, can “run, and not be weary; . . . walk, and not faint,” who gain good rapidly and hold their position, or attain slowly and yield not to discouragement. God requires perfection, but not until the battle between Spirit and flesh is fought and the victory won. To stop eating, drinking, or being clothed materially before the spiritual facts of existence are gained step by step, is not legitimate. When we wait patiently on God and seek Truth righteously, He directs our path. Imperfect mortals grasp the ultimate of spiritual perfection slowly; but to begin aright and to continue the strife of demonstrating the great problem of being, is doing much.
During the sensual ages, absolute Christian Science may not be achieved prior to the change called death, for we have not the power to demonstrate what we do not understand. But the human self must be evangelized. This task God demands us to accept lovingly to-day, and to abandon so fast as practical the material, and to work out the spiritual which determines the outward and actual.
If you venture upon the quiet surface of error and are in sympathy with error, what is there to disturb the waters? What is there to strip off error’s disguise?
The cross and crown
If you launch your bark upon the ever-agitated but healthful waters of truth, you will encounter storms. Your good will be evil spoken of. This is the cross. Take it up and bear it, for through it you win and wear the crown. Pilgrim on earth, thy home is heaven; stranger, thou art the guest of God.
Chapter IX – Creation
Thy throne is established of old
Thou art from everlasting.–PSALMS.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.–PAUL.
Inadequate theories of creation
ETERNAL Truth is changing the universe. As mortals drop off their mental swaddling-clothes, thought expands into expression. “Let there be light,” is the perpetual demand of Truth and Love, changing chaos into order and discord into the music of the spheres. The mythical human theories of creation, anciently classified as the higher criticism, sprang from cultured scholars in Rome and in Greece, but they afforded no foundation for accurate views of creation by the divine Mind.
Finite views of Deity
Mortal man has made a covenant with his eyes to belittle Deity with human conceptions. In league with material sense, mortals take limited views of all things. That God is corporeal or material, no man should affirm.
The human form, or physical finiteness, cannot be made the basis of any true idea of the infinite Godhead. Eye hath not seen Spirit, nor hath ear heard His voice.
No material creation
Progress takes off human shackles. The finite must yield to the infinite. Advancing to a higher plane of action, thought rises from the material sense to the spiritual, from the scholastic to the inspirational, and from the mortal to the immortal. All things are created spiritually. Mind, not matter, is the creator. Love, the divine Principle, is the Father and Mother of the universe, including man.
Tritheism impossible
The theory of three persons in one God (that is, a personal Trinity or Tri-unity) suggests polytheism, rather than the one ever-present I AM. “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.”
No divine corporeality
The everlasting I AM is not bounded nor compressed within the narrow limits of physical humanity, nor can He be understood aright through mortal concepts. The precise form of God must be of small importance in comparison with the sublime question, What is infinite Mind or divine Love?
Who is it that demands our obedience? He who, in the language of Scripture, “doeth according to His will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay His hand, or say unto Him, What doest Thou?”
No form nor physical combination is adequate to represent infinite Love. A finite and material sense of God leads to formalism and narrowness; it chills the spirit of Christianity.
Limitless Mind
A limitless Mind cannot proceed from physical limitations. Finiteness cannot present the idea or the vastness of infinity. A mind originating from a finite or material source must be limited and finite. Infinite Mind is the creator, and creation is the infinite image or idea emanating from this Mind. If Mind is within and without all things, then all is Mind; and this definition is scientific.
Matter is not substance
If matter, so-called, is substance, then Spirit, matter’s unlikeness, must be shadow; and shadow cannot produce substance. The theory that Spirit is not the only substance and creator is pantheistic heterodoxy, which ultimates in sickness, sin, and death; it is the belief in a bodily soul and a material mind, a soul governed by the body and a mind in matter. This belief is shallow pantheism.
Mind creates His own likeness in ideas, and the substance of an idea is very far from being the supposed substance of non-intelligent matter. Hence the Father Mind is not the father of matter. The material senses and human conceptions would translate spiritual ideas into material beliefs, and would say that an anthropomorphic God, instead of infinite Principle,–in other words, divine Love,–is the father of the rain, “who hath begotten the drops of dew,” who bringeth “forth Mazzaroth in his season,” and guideth “Arcturus with his sons.”
Inexhaustible divine Love
Finite mind manifests all sorts of errors, and thus proves the material theory of mind in matter to be the antipode of Mind. Who hath found finite life or love sufficient to meet the demands of human want and woe, – to still the desires, to satisfy the aspirations? Infinite Mind cannot be limited to a finite form, or Mind would lose its infinite character as inexhaustible Love, eternal Life, omnipotent Truth.
Infinite physique impossible
It would require an infinite form to contain infinite Mind. Indeed, the phrase infinite form involves a contradiction of terms. Finite man cannot be the image and likeness of the infinite God. A mortal, corporeal, or finite conception of God cannot embrace the glories of limitless, incorporeal Life and Love. Hence the unsatisfied human craving for something better, higher, holier, than is afforded by a material belief in a physical God and man. The insufficiency of this belief to supply the true idea proves the falsity of material belief.
Infinity’s reflection
Man is more than a material form with a mind inside, which must escape from its environments in order to be immortal. Man reflects infinity, and this reflection is the true idea of God.
God expresses in man the infinite idea forever developing itself, broadening and rising higher and higher from a boundless basis. Mind manifests all that exists in the infinitude of Truth. We know no more of man as the true divine image and likeness, than we know of God.
The infinite Principle is reflected by the infinite idea and spiritual individuality, but the material so-called senses have no cognizance of either Principle or its idea. The human capacities are enlarged and perfected in proportion as humanity gains the true conception of man and God.
Individual permanency
Mortals have a very imperfect sense of the spiritual man and of the infinite range of his thought. To him belongs eternal Life. Never born and never dying, it were impossible for man, under the government of God in eternal Science, to fall from his high estate.
God’s man discerned
Through spiritual sense you can discern the heart of divinity, and thus begin to comprehend in Science the generic term man. Man is not absorbed in Deity, and man cannot lose his individuality, for he reflects eternal Life; nor is he an isolated, solitary idea, for he represents infinite Mind, the sum of all substance.
In divine Science, man is the true image of God. The divine nature was best expressed in Christ Jesus, who threw upon mortals the truer reflection of God and lifted their lives higher than their poor thought-models would allow,–thoughts which presented man as fallen, sick, sinning, and dying. The Christlike understanding of scientific being and divine healing includes a perfect Principle and idea,–perfect God and perfect man,–as the basis of thought and demonstration.
The divine image not lost
If man was once perfect but has now lost his perfection, then mortals have never beheld in man the reflex image of God. The lost image is no image. The true likeness cannot be lost in divine reflection. Understanding this, Jesus said: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”
Immortal models
Mortal thought transmits its own images, and forms its offspring after human illusions. God, Spirit, works spiritually, not materially. Brain or matter never formed a human concept. Vibration is not intelligence; hence it is not a creator. Immortal ideas, pure, perfect, and enduring, are transmitted by the divine Mind through divine Science, which corrects error with truth and demands spiritual thoughts, divine concepts, to the end that they may produce harmonious results.
Deducing one’s conclusions as to man from imperfection instead of perfection, one can no more arrive at the true conception or understanding of man, and make himself like it, than the sculptor can perfect his outlines from an imperfect model, or the painter can depict the form and face of Jesus, while holding in thought the character of Judas.
Spiritual discovery
The conceptions of mortal, erring thought must give way to the ideal of all that is perfect and eternal. Through many generations human beliefs will be attaining diviner conceptions, and the immortal and perfect model of God’s creation will finally be seen as the only true conception of being.
Science reveals the possibility of achieving all good, and sets mortals at work to discover what God has already done; but distrust of one’s ability to gain the goodness desired and to bring out better and higher results, often hampers the trial of one’s wings and ensures failure at the outset.
Requisite change of our ideals
Mortals must change their ideals in order to improve their models. A sick body is evolved from sick thoughts. Sickness, disease, and death proceed from fear. Sensualism evolves bad physical and moral conditions.
Selfishness and sensualism are educated in mortal mind by the thoughts ever recurring to one’s self, by conversation about the body, and by the expectation of perpetual pleasure or pain from it; and this education is at the expense of spiritual growth. If we array thought in mortal vestures, it must lose its immortal nature.
Thoughts are things
If we look to the body for pleasure, we find pain; for Life, we find death; for Truth, we find error; for Spirit, we find its opposite, matter. Now reverse this action. Look away from the body into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality. Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts.
Unreality of pain
The effect of mortal mind on health and happiness is seen in this: If one turns away from the body with such absorbed interest as to forget it, the body experiences no pain. Under the strong impulse of a desire to perform his part, a noted actor was accustomed night after night to go upon the stage and sustain his appointed task, walking about as actively as the youngest member of the company. This old man was so lame that he hobbled every day to the theatre, and sat aching in his chair till his cue was spoken,–a signal which made him as oblivious of physical infirmity as if he had inhaled chloroform, though he was in the full possession of his so-called senses.
Immutable identity of man
Detach sense from the body, or matter, which is only a form of human belief, and you may learn the meaning of God, or good, and the nature of the immutable and immortal. Breaking away from the mutations of time and sense, you will neither lose the solid objects and ends of life nor your own identity. Fixing your gaze on the realities supernal, you will rise to the spiritual consciousness of being, even as the bird which has burst from the egg and preens its wings for a skyward flight.
Forgetfulness of self
We should forget our bodies in remembering good and the human race. Good demands of man every hour, in which to work out the problem of being. Consecration to good does not lessen man’s dependence on God, but heightens it. Neither does consecration diminish man’s obligations to God, but shows the paramount necessity of meeting them. Christian Science takes naught from the perfection of God, but it ascribes to Him the entire glory. By putting “off the old man with his deeds,” mortals “put on immortality.”
We cannot fathom the nature and quality of God’s creation by diving into the shallows of mortal belief. We must reverse our feeble flutterings–our efforts to find life and truth in matter–and rise above the testimony of the material senses, above the mortal to the immortal idea of God. These clearer, higher views inspire the Godlike man to reach the absolute centre and circumference of his being.
The true sense
Job said: “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee.” Mortals will echo Job’s thought, when the supposed pain and pleasure of matter cease to predominate. They will then drop the false estimate of life and happiness, of joy and sorrow, and attain the bliss of loving unselfishly, working patiently, and conquering all that is unlike God. Starting from a higher standpoint, one rises spontaneously, even as light emits light without effort; for “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Mind only the cause
The foundation of mortal discord is a false sense of man’s origin. To begin rightly is to end rightly. Every concept which seems to begin with the brain begins falsely. Divine Mind is the only cause or Principle of existence. Cause does not exist in matter, in mortal mind, or in physical forms.
Human egotism
Mortals are egotists. They believe themselves to be independent workers, personal authors, and even privileged originators of something which Deity would not or could not create. The creations of mortal mind are material. Immortal spiritual man alone represents the truth of creation.
Mortal man a mis-creator
When mortal man blends his thoughts of existence with the spiritual and works only as God works, he will no longer grope in the dark and cling to earth because he has not tasted heaven. Carnal beliefs defraud us. They make man an involuntary hypocrite,–producing evil when he would create good, forming deformity when he would outline grace and beauty, injuring those whom he would bless. He becomes a general mis-creator, who believes he is a semi-god. His “touch turns hope to dust, the dust we all have trod.” He might say in Bible language: “The good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
No new creation
There can be but one creator, who has created all. Whatever seems to be a new creation, is but the discovery of some distant idea of Truth; else it is a new multiplication or self-division of mortal thought, as when some finite sense peers from its cloister with amazement and attempts to pattern the infinite.
The multiplication of a human and mortal sense of persons and things is not creation. A sensual thought, like an atom of dust thrown into the face of spiritual immensity, is dense blindness instead of a scientific eternal consciousness of creation.
Mind’s true camera
The fading forms of matter, the mortal body and material earth, are the fleeting concepts of the human mind. They have their day before the permanent facts and their perfection in Spirit appear. The crude creations of mortal thought must finally give place to the glorious forms which we sometimes behold in the camera of divine Mind, when the mental picture is spiritual and eternal. Mortals must look beyond fading, finite forms, if they would gain the true sense of things. Where shall the gaze rest but in the unsearchable realm of Mind? We must look where we would walk, and we must act as possessing all power from Him in whom we have our being.
Self-completeness
As mortals gain more correct views of God and man, multitudinous objects of creation, which before were invisible, will become visible. When we realize that Life is Spirit, never in nor of matter, this understanding will expand into self-completeness, finding all in God, good, and needing no other consciousness.
Spiritual proofs of existence
Spirit and its formations are the only realities of being. Matter disappears under the microscope of Spirit. Sin is unsustained by Truth, and sickness and death were overcome by Jesus, who proved them to be forms of error. Spiritual living and blessedness are the only evidences, by which we can recognize true existence and feel the unspeakable peace which comes from an all-absorbing spiritual love.
When we learn the way in Christian Science and recognize man’s spiritual being, we shall behold and understand God’s creation,–all the glories of earth and heaven and man.
Godward gravitation
The universe of Spirit is peopled with spiritual beings, and its government is divine Science. Man is the offspring, not of the lowest, but of the highest qualities of Mind. Man understands spiritual existence in proportion as his treasures of Truth and Love are enlarged. Mortals must gravitate Godward, their affections and aims grow spiritual,–they must near the broader interpretations of being, and gain some proper sense of the infinite,–in order that sin and mortality may be put off.
This scientific sense of being, forsaking matter for Spirit, by no means suggests man’s absorption into Deity and the loss of his identity, but confers upon man enlarged individuality, a wider sphere of thought and action, a more expansive love, a higher and more permanent peace.
Mortal birth and death
The senses represent birth as untimely and death as irresistible, as if man were a weed growing apace or a flower withered by the sun and nipped by untimely frosts; but this is true only of a mortal, not of a man in God’s image and likeness. The truth of being is perennial, and the error is unreal and obsolete.
Blessings from pain
Who that has felt the loss of human peace has not gained stronger desires for spiritual joy? The aspiration after heavenly good comes even before we discover what belongs to wisdom and Love. The loss of earthly hopes and pleasures brightens the ascending path of many a heart. The pains of sense quickly inform us that the pleasures of sense are mortal and that joy is spiritual.
Decapitation of error
The pains of sense are salutary, if they wrench away false pleasurable beliefs and transplant the affections from sense to Soul, where the creations of God are good, “rejoicing the heart.” Such is the sword of Science, with which Truth decapitates error, materiality giving place to man’s higher individuality and destiny.
Uses of adversity
Would existence without personal friends be to you a blank? Then the time will come when you will be solitary, left without sympathy; but this seeming vacuum is already filled with divine Love. When this hour of development comes, even if you cling to a sense of personal joys, spiritual Love will force you to accept what best promotes your growth. Friends will betray and enemies will slander, until the lesson is sufficient to exalt you; for “man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” The author has experienced the foregoing prophecy and its blessings. Thus He teaches mortals to lay down their fleshliness and gain spirituality. This is done through self-abnegation. Universal Love is the divine way in Christian Science.
The sinner makes his own hell by doing evil, and the saint his own heaven by doing right. The opposite persecutions of material sense, aiding evil with evil, would deceive the very elect.
Beatific presence
Mortals must follow Jesus’ sayings and his demonstrations, which dominate the flesh. Perfect and infinite Mind enthroned is heaven. The evil beliefs which originate in mortals are hell. Man is the idea of Spirit; he reflects the beatific presence, illuming the universe with light. Man is deathless, spiritual. He is above sin or frailty. He does not cross the barriers of time into the vast forever of Life, but he coexists with God and the universe.
The infinitude of God
Every object in material thought will be destroyed, but the spiritual idea, whose substance is in Mind, is eternal. The offspring of God start not from matter or ephemeral dust. They are in and of Spirit, divine Mind, and so forever continue. God is one. The allness of Deity is His oneness. Generically man is one, and specifically man means all men.
It is generally conceded that God is Father, eternal, selfcreated, infinite. If this is so, the forever Father must have had children prior to Adam. The great I AM made all “that was made.” Hence man and the spiritual universe coexist with God.
Christian Scientists understand that, in a religious sense, they have the same authority for the appellative mother, as for that of brother and sister. Jesus said: “For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.”
Waymarks to eternal Truth
When examined in the light of divine Science, mortals present more than is detected upon the surface, since inverted thoughts and erroneous beliefs must be counterfeits of Truth. Thought is borrowed from a higher source than matter, and by reversal, errors serve as waymarks to the one Mind, in which all error disappears in celestial Truth. The robes of Spirit are “white and glistering,” like the raiment of Christ. Even in this world, therefore, “let thy garments be always white.” “Blessed is the man that endureth [overcometh] temptation: for when he is tried, [proved faithful], he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him.” (James i. 12.)
Chapter X – Science of Being
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life, . . . That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. – JOHN, First Epistle.
Here I stand. I can do no otherwise; so help me God! Amen!–MARTIN LUTHER.
Materialistic challenge
In the material world, thought has brought to light with great rapidity many useful wonders. With like activity have thought’s swift pinions been rising towards the realm of the real, to the spiritual cause of those lower things which give impulse to inquiry. Belief in a material basis, from which may be deduced all rationality, is slowly yielding to the idea of a metaphysical basis, looking away from matter to Mind as the cause of every effect. Materialistic hypotheses challenge metaphysics to meet in final combat. In this revolutionary period, like the shepherd-boy with his sling, woman goes forth to battle with Goliath.
Confusion confounded
In this final struggle for supremacy, semi-metaphysical systems afford no substantial aid to scientific metaphysics, for their arguments are based on the false testimony of the material senses as well as on the facts of Mind. These semi-metaphysical systems are one and all pantheistic, and savor of Pandemonium, a house divided against itself.
From first to last the supposed coexistence of Mind and matter and the mingling of good and evil have resulted from the philosophy of the serpent. Jesus’ demonstrations sift the chaff from the wheat, and unfold the unity and the reality of good, the unreality, the nothingness, of evil.
Divine metaphysics
Human philosophy has made God manlike. Christian Science makes man Godlike. The first is error; the latter is truth. Metaphysics is above physics, and matter does not enter into metaphysical premises or conclusions. The categories of metaphysics rest on one basis, the divine Mind. Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul.
These ideas are perfectly real and tangible to spiritual consciousness, and they have this, advantage over the objects and thoughts of material sense,–they are good and eternal.
Biblical foundations
The testimony of the material senses is neither absolute nor divine. I therefore plant myself unreservedly on the teachings of Jesus, of his apostles, of the prophets, and on the testimony of the Science of Mind. Other foundations there are none. All other systems–systems based wholly or partly on knowledge gained through the material senses–are reeds shaken by the wind, not houses built on the rock.
Rejected theories
The theories I combat 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 theory, that matter is everything, is quite as reasonable as the second, that Mind and matter coexist and cooperate. One only of the following statements can be true: (1) that everything is matter; (2) that everything is Mind. Which one is it?
Matter and Mind are opposites. One is contrary to the other in its very nature and essence; hence both cannot be real. If one is real, the other must be unreal. Only by understanding that there is but one power,–not two powers, matter and Mind,–are scientific and logical conclusions reached. Few deny the hypothesis that intelligence, apart from man and matter, governs the universe; and it is generally admitted that this intelligence is the eternal Mind or divine principle, Love.
Prophetic ignorance
The prophets of old looked for something higher than the systems of their times; hence their foresight of the new dispensation of Truth. But they knew not what would be the precise nature of the teaching and demonstration of God, divine Mind, in His more infinite meanings,–the demonstration which was to destroy sin, sickness, and death, establish the definition of omnipotence, and maintain the Science of Spirit.
The pride of priesthood is the prince of this world. It has nothing in Christ. Meekness and charity have divine authority. Mortals think wickedly; consequently they are wicked. They think sickly thoughts, and so become sick. If sin makes sinners, Truth and Love alone can unmake them. If a sense of disease produces suffering and a sense of ease antidotes suffering, disease is mental, not material. Hence the fact that the human mind alone suffers, is sick, and that the divine Mind alone heals.
The life of Christ Jesus was not miraculous, but it was indigenous to his spirituality,–the good soil wherein the seed of Truth springs up and bears much fruit. Christ’s Christianity is the chain of scientific being reappearing in all ages, maintaining its obvious correspondence with the Scriptures and uniting all periods in the design of God. Neither emasculation, illusion, nor insubordination exists in divine Science.
Jesus instructed his disciples whereby to heal the sick through Mind instead of matter. He knew that the philosophy, Science, and proof of Christianity were in Truth, casting out all inharmony.
Studious disciples
In Latin the word rendered disciple signifies student; and the word indicates that the power of healing was not a supernatural gift to those learners, but the result of their cultivated spiritual understanding of the divine Science, which their Master demonstrated by healing the sick and sinning. Hence the universal application of his saying: “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me [understand me] through their word.”
New Testament basis
Our Master said, “But the Comforter . . . shall teach you all things.” When the Science of Christianity appears, it will lead you into all truth. The Sermon on the Mount is the essence of this Science, and the eternal life, not the death of Jesus, is its outcome.
Modern evangel
Those, who are willing to leave their nets or to cast them on the right side for Truth, have the opportunity now, as aforetime, to learn and to practise Christian healing. The Scriptures contain it. The spiritual import of the Word imparts this power. But, as Paul says, “How shall they hear without a preacher? and how shall they preach, except they be sent?” If sent, how shall they preach, convert, and heal multitudes, except the people hear?
Spirituality of Scripture
The spiritual sense of truth must be gained before Truth can be understood. This sense is assimilated only as we are honest, unselfish, loving, and meek. In the soil of an “honest and good heart” the seed must be sown; else it beareth not much fruit, for the swinish element in human nature uproots it. Jesus said: “Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures.” The spiritual sense of the Scriptures brings out the scientific sense, and is the new tongue referred to in the last chapter of Mark’s Gospel.
Jesus’ parable of “the sower” shows the care our Master took not to impart to dull ears and gross hearts the spiritual teachings which dulness and grossness could not accept. Reading the thoughts of the people, he said: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.”
Unspiritual contrasts
It is the spiritualization of thought and Christianization of daily life, in contrast with the results of the ghastly farce of material existence; it is chastity and purity, in contrast with the downward tendencies and earthward gravitation of sensualism and impurity, which really attest the divine origin and operation of Christian Science. The triumphs of Christian Science are recorded in the destruction of error and evil, from which are propagated the dismal beliefs of sin, sickness, and death.
God the Principle of all
The divine Principle of the universe must interpret the universe. God is the divine Principle of all that represents Him and of all that really exists. Christian Science, as demonstrated by Jesus, alone reveals the natural, divine Principle of Science.
Matter and its claims of sin, sickness, and death are contrary to God, and cannot emanate from Him. There is no material truth. The physical senses can take no cognizance of God and spiritual Truth. Human belief has sought out many inventions, but not one of them can solve the problem of being without the divine Principle of divine Science. Deductions from material hypotheses are not scientific. They differ from real Science because they are not based on the divine law.
Science versus sense
Divine Science reverses the false testimony of the material senses, and thus tears away the foundations of error. Hence the enmity between Science and the senses, and the impossibility of attaining perfect understanding till the errors of sense are eliminated.
The so-called laws of matter and of medical science have never made mortals whole, harmonious, and immortal. Man is harmonious when governed by Soul. Hence the importance of understanding the truth of being, which reveals the laws of spiritual existence.
Spiritual law the only law
God never ordained a material law to annul the spiritual law. If there were such a material law, it would oppose the supremacy of Spirit, God, and impugn the wisdom of the creator. Jesus walked on the waves, fed the multitude, healed the sick, and raised the dead in direct opposition to material laws. His acts were the demonstration of Science, overcoming the false claims of material sense or law.
Material knowledge illusive
Science shows that material, conflicting mortal opinions and beliefs emit the effects of error at all times, but this atmosphere of mortal mind cannot be destructive to morals and health when it is opposed promptly and persistently by Christian Science. Truth and Love antidote this mental miasma, and thus invigorate and sustain existence. Unnecessary knowledge gained from the five senses is only temporal, – the conception of mortal mind, the offspring of sense, not of Soul, Spirit,–and symbolizes all that is evil and perishable. Natural science, as it is commonly called, is not really natural nor scientific, because it is deduced from the evidence of the material senses. Ideas, on the contrary, are born of Spirit, and are not mere inferences drawn from material premises.
Five senses deceptive
The senses of Spirit abide in Love, and they demonstrate Truth and Life. Hence Christianity and the Science which expounds it are based on spiritual understanding, and they supersede the socalled laws of matter. Jesus demonstrated this great verity. When what we erroneously term the five physical senses are misdirected, they are simply the manifested beliefs of mortal mind, which affirm that life, substance, and intelligence are material, instead of spiritual. These false beliefs and their products constitute the flesh, and the flesh wars against Spirit.
Impossible partnership
Divine Science is absolute, and permits no half-way position in learning its Principle and rule–establishing it by demonstration. The conventional firm, called matter and mind, God never formed. Science and understanding, governed by the unerring and eternal Mind, destroy the imaginary copartnership, matter and mind, formed only to be destroyed in a manner and at a period as yet unknown. This suppositional partnership is already obsolete, for matter, examined in the light of divine metaphysics, disappears.
Spirit the starting-point
Matter has no life to lose, and Spirit never dies. A partnership of mind with matter would ignore omnipresent and omnipotent Mind. This shows that matter did not originate in God, Spirit, and is not eternal. Therefore matter is neither substantial, living, nor intelligent. The starting-point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind,–that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle.
Divine synonyms
To grasp the reality and order of being in its Science, you must begin by reckoning God as the divine Principle of all that really is. Spirit, Life, Truth, Love, combine as one,–and are the Scriptural names for God. All substance, intelligence, wisdom, being, immortality, cause, and effect belong to God. These are His attributes, the eternal manifestations of the infinite divine Principle, Love. No wisdom is wise but His wisdom; no truth is true, no love is lovely, no life is Life but the divine; no good is, but the good God bestows.
The divine completeness
Divine metaphysics, as revealed to spiritual understanding, shows clearly that all is Mind, and that Mind is God, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, – that is, all power, all presence, all Science. Hence all is in reality the manifestation of Mind.
Our material human theories are destitute of Science. The true understanding of God is spiritual. It robs the grave of victory. It destroys the false evidence that misleads thought and points to other gods, or other so-called powers, such as matter, disease, sin, and death, superior or contrary to the one Spirit.
Truth, spiritually discerned, is scientifically understood. It casts out error and heals the sick.
Universal brotherhood
Having one God, one Mind, unfolds the power that heals the sick, and fulfils these sayings of Scripture, “I am the Lord that healeth thee,” and “I have found a ransom.” When the divine precepts are understood, they unfold the foundation of fellowship, in which one mind is not at war with another, but all have one Spirit, God, one intelligent source, in accordance with the Scriptural command: “Let this Mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” Man and his Maker are correlated in divine Science, and real consciousness is cognizant only of the things of God.
The realization that all inharmony is unreal brings objects and thoughts into human view in their true light, and presents them as beautiful and immortal. Harmony in man is as real and immortal as in music. Discord is unreal and mortal.
Perfection requisite
If God is admitted to be the only Mind and Life, there ceases to be any opportunity 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 materiality to the Principle of the universe, including harmonious man.
Material beliefs and spiritual understanding never mingle. The latter destroys the former. Discord is the nothingness named error. Harmony is the somethingness named Truth.
Like evolving like
Nature and revelation inform us that like produces like. Divine Science does not gather grapes from thorns nor figs from thistles. Intelligence never produces non-intelligence; but matter is ever non-intelligent and therefore cannot spring from intelligence. To all that is unlike unerring and eternal Mind, this Mind saith, “Thou shalt surely die;” and elsewhere the Scripture says that dust returns to dust. The non-intelligent relapses into its own unreality. Matter never produces mind. The immortal never produces the mortal. Good cannot result in evil. As God Himself is good and is Spirit, goodness and spirituality must be immortal. Their opposites, evil and matter, are mortal error, and error has no creator. If goodness and spirituality are real, evil and materiality are unreal and cannot be the outcome of an infinite God, good.
Natural history presents vegetables and animals as preserving their original species,–like reproducing like. A mineral is not produced by a vegetable nor the man by the brute. In reproduction, the order of genus and species is preserved throughout the entire round of nature. This points to the spiritual truth and Science of being. Error relies upon a reversal of this order, asserts that Spirit produces matter and matter produces all the ills of flesh, and therefore that good is the origin of evil. These suppositions contradict even the order of material so-called science.
Material error
The realm of the real is Spirit. The unlikeness of Spirit is matter, and the opposite of the real is not divine,–it is a human concept. Matter is an error of statement. This error in the premise leads to errors in the conclusion in every statement into which it enters. Nothing we can say or believe regarding matter is immortal, for matter is temporal and is therefore a mortal phenomenon, a human concept, sometimes beautiful, always erroneous.
Substance versus supposition
Is Spirit the source or creator of matter? Science reveals nothing in Spirit out of which to create matter. Divine metaphysics explains away matter. Spirit is the only substance and consciousness recognized by divine Science. The material senses oppose this, but there are no material senses, for matter has no mind. In Spirit there is no matter, even as in Truth there is no error, and in good no evil. It is a false supposition, the notion that there is real substancematter, the opposite of Spirit. Spirit, God, is infinite, all. Spirit can have no opposite.
One cause supreme
That matter is substantial or has life and sensation, is one of the false beliefs of mortals, and exists only in a supposititious mortal consciousness. Hence, as we approach Spirit and Truth, we lose the consciousness of matter. The admission that there can be material substance requires another admission, namely, that Spirit is not infinite and that matter is selfcreative, self-existent, and eternal. From this it would follow that there are two eternal causes, warring forever with each other; and yet we say that Spirit is supreme and all-presence.
The belief of the eternity of matter contradicts the demonstration of life as Spirit, and leads to the conclusion that if man is material, he originated in matter and must return to dust, – logic which would prove his annihilation.
Substance is Spirit
All that we term sin, sickness, and death is a mortal belief. We define matter as error, because it is the opposite of life, substance, and intelligence. Matter, with its mortality, cannot be substantial if Spirit is substantial and eternal. Which ought to be substance to us,–the erring, changing, and dying, the mutable and mortal, or the unerring, immutable, and immortal? A New Testament writer plainly describes faith, a quality of mind, as “the substance of things hoped for.”
Material mortality
The doom of matter establishes the conclusion that matter, slime, or protoplasm never originated in the immortal Mind, and is therefore not eternal. Matter is neither created by Mind nor for the manifestation and support of Mind.
Spiritual tangibility
Ideas are tangible and real to immortal consciousness, and they have the advantage of being eternal. Spirit and matter can neither coexist nor cooperate, and one can no more create the other than Truth can create error, or vice versa.
In proportion as the belief disappears that life and intelligence are in or of matter, the immortal facts of being are seen, and their only idea or intelligence is in God. Spirit is reached only through the understanding and demonstration of eternal Life and Truth and Love.
Pantheistic tendencies
Every system of human philosophy, doctrine, and medicine is more or less infected with the pantheistic belief that there is mind in matter; but this belief contradicts alike revelation and right reasoning. A logical and scientific conclusion is reached only through the knowledge that there are not two bases of being, matter and mind, but one alone, Mind.
Pantheism, starting from a material sense of God, seeks cause in effect, Principle in its idea, and life and intelligence in matter.
The things of God are beautiful
In the infinitude of Mind, matter must be unknown. Symbols and elements of discord and decay are not products of the infinite, perfect, and eternal All. From Love and from the light and harmony which are the abode of Spirit, only reflections of good can come. All things beautiful and harmless are ideas of Mind. Mind creates and multiplies them, and the product must be mental.
Finite belief can never do justice to Truth in any direction. Finite belief limits all things, and would compress Mind, which is infinite, beneath a skull bone. Such belief can neither apprehend nor worship the infinite; and to accommodate its finite sense of the divisibility of Soul and substance, it seeks to divide the one Spirit into persons and souls.
Belief in many gods
Through this error, human belief comes to have “gods many and lords many.” Moses declared as Jehovah’s first command of the Ten: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me!” But behold the zeal of belief to establish the opposite error of many minds. The argument of the serpent in the allegory, “Ye shall be as gods,” urges through every avenue the belief that Soul is in body, and that infinite Spirit, and Life, is in finite forms.
Sensationless body
Rightly understood, instead of possessing a sentient material form, man has a sensationless body; and God, the Soul of man and of all existence, being perpetual in His own individuality, harmony, and immortality, imparts and perpetuates these qualities in man,–through Mind, not matter. The only excuse for entertaining human opinions and rejecting the Science of being is our mortal ignorance of Spirit,–ignorance which yields only to the understanding of divine Science, the understanding by which we enter into the kingdom of Truth on earth and learn that Spirit is infinite and supreme. Spirit and matter no more commingle than light and darkness. When one appears, the other disappears.
God and His image
Error presupposes man to be both mind and matter. Divine Science contradicts the corporeal senses, rebukes mortal belief, and asks: What is the Ego, whence its origin and what its destiny? The Ego-man is the reflection of the Ego-God; the Ego-man is the image and likeness of perfect Mind, Spirit, divine Principle.
The one Ego, the one Mind or Spirit called God, is infinite individuality, which supplies all form and comeliness and which reflects reality and divinity in individual spiritual man and things.
The mind supposed to exist in matter or beneath a skull bone is a myth, a misconceived sense and false conception as to man and Mind. When we put off the false sense for the true, and see that sin and mortality have neither Principle nor permanency, we shall learn that sin and mortality are without actual origin or rightful existence. They are native nothingness, out of which error would simulate creation through a man formed from dust.
The true new idea
Divine Science does not put new wine into old bottles, Soul into matter, nor the infinite into the finite. Our false views of matter perish as we grasp the facts of Spirit. The old belief must be cast out or the new idea will be spilled, and the inspiration, which is to change our standpoint, will be lost. Now, as of old, Truth casts out evils and heals the sick.
Figures of being
The real Life, or Mind, and its opposite, the so-called material life and mind, are figured by two geometrical symbols, a circle or sphere and a straight line. The circle represents the infinite without beginning or end; the straight line represents the finite, which has both beginning and end. The sphere represents good, the self-existent and eternal individuality or Mind; the straight line represents evil, a belief in a self-made and temporary material existence. Eternal Mind and temporary material existence never unite in figure or in fact.
Opposite symbols
A straight line finds no abiding-place in a curve, and a curve finds no adjustment to a straight line. Similarly, matter has no place in Spirit, and Spirit has no place in matter. Truth has no home in error, and error has no foothold in Truth. Mind cannot pass into non-intelligence and matter, nor can non-intelligence become Soul. At no point can these opposites mingle or unite. Even though they seem to touch, one is still a curve and the other a straight line.
There is no inherent power in matter; for all that is material is a material, human, mortal thought, always governing itself erroneously.
Truth is the intelligence of immortal Mind. Error is the so-called intelligence of mortal mind.
Truth is not inverted
Whatever indicates the fall of man or the opposite of God or God’s absence, is the Adam-dream, which is neither Mind nor man, for it is not begotten of the Father. The rule of inversion infers from error its opposite, Truth; but Truth is the light which dispels error. As mortals begin to understand Spirit, they give up the belief that there is any true existence apart from God.
Source of all life and action
Mind is the source of all movement, and there is no inertia to retard or check its perpetual and harmonious action. Mind is the same Life, Love, and wisdom “yesterday, and to-day, and forever.” Matter and its effects–sin, sickness, and death–are states of mortal mind which act, react, and then come to a stop. They are not facts of Mind. They are not ideas, but illusions. Principle is absolute. It admits of no error, but rests upon understanding.
But what say prevalent theories? They insist that Life, or God, is one and the same with material life socalled. They speak of both Truth and error as mind, and of good and evil as spirit. They claim that to be life which is but the objective state of material sense, such as the structural life of the tree and of material man,–and deem this the manifestation of the one Life, God.
Spiritual structure
This false belief as to what really constitutes life so detracts from God’s character and nature, that the true sense of His power is lost to all who cling to this falsity. The divine Principle, or Life, cannot be practically demonstrated in length of days, as it was by the patriarchs, unless its Science be accurately stated. We must receive the divine Principle in the understanding, and live it in daily life; and unless we so do, we can no more demonstrate Science, than we can teach and illustrate geometry by calling a curve a straight line or a straight line a sphere.
Are mentality, immortality, consciousness, resident in matter? It is not rational to say that Mind is infinite, but dwells in finiteness,–in matter,–or that matter is infinite and the medium of Mind.
Mind never limited
If God were limited to man or matter, or if the infinite could be circumscribed within the finite, God would be corporeal, and unlimited Mind would seem to spring from a limited body; but this is an impossibility. Infinite Mind can have no starting-point, and can return to no limit. It can never be in bonds, nor be fully manifested through corporeality.
Material recognition impossible
Is God’s image or likeness matter, or a mortal, sin, sickness, and death? Can matter recognize Mind? Can infinite Mind recognize matter? Can the infinite dwell in the finite or know aught unlike the infinite? Can Deity be known through the material senses? Can the material senses, which receive no direct evidence of Spirit, give correct testimony as to spiritual life, truth, and love?
The answer to all these questions must forever be in the negative.
Our physical insensibility to Spirit
The physical senses can obtain no proof of God. They can neither see Spirit through the eye nor hear it through the ear, nor can they feel, taste, or smell Spirit. Even the more subtile and misnamed material elements are beyond the cognizance of these senses, and are known only by the effects commonly attributed to them.
According to Christian Science, the only real senses of man are spiritual, emanating from divine Mind. Thought passes from God to man, but neither sensation nor report goes from material body to Mind. The intercommunication is always from God to His idea, man.
Matter is not sentient and cannot be cognizant of good or of evil, of pleasure or of pain. Man’s individuality is not material. This Science of being obtains not alone hereafter in what men call Paradise, but here and now; it is the great fact of being for time and eternity.
The human counterfeit
What, then, is the material personality which suffers, sins, and dies? It is not man, the image and likeness of God, but man’s counterfeit, the inverted likeness, the unlikeness called sin, sickness, and death. The unreality of the claim that a mortal is the true image of God is illustrated by the opposite natures of Spirit and matter, Mind and body, for one is intelligence while the other is non-intelligence.
Material misconceptions
Is God a physical personality? Spirit is not physical. The belief that a material body is man is a false conception of man. The time has come for a finite conception of the infinite and of a material body as the seat of Mind to give place to a diviner sense of intelligence and its manifestations, to the better understanding that Science gives of the Supreme Being, or divine Principle, and idea.
Salvation is through reform
By interpreting God as a corporeal Saviour but not as the saving Principle, or divine Love, we shall continue to seek salvation through pardon and not through reform, and resort to matter instead of Spirit for the cure of the sick. As mortals reach, through knowledge of Christian Science, a higher sense, they will seek to learn, not from matter, but from the divine Principle, God, how to demonstrate the Christ, Truth, as the healing and saving power.
It is essential to understand, instead of believe, what relates most nearly to the happiness of being. To seek Truth through belief in a human doctrine is not to understand the infinite. We must not seek the immutable and immortal through the finite, mutable, and mortal, and so depend upon belief instead of demonstration, for this is fatal to a knowledge of Science. The understanding of Truth gives full faith in Truth, and spiritual understanding is better than all burnt offerings.
The Master said, “No man cometh unto the Father [the divine Principle of being] but by me,” Christ, Life, Truth, Love; for Christ says, “I am the way.” Physical causation was put aside from first to last by this original man, Jesus. He knew that the divine. Principle, Love, creates and governs all that is real.
Goodness a portion of God
In the Saxon and twenty other tongues good is the term for God. The Scriptures declare all that He made to be good, like Himself,–good in Principle and in idea. Therefore the spiritual universe is good, and reflects God as He is.
Spiritual thoughts
God’s thoughts are perfect and eternal, are substance and Life. Material and temporal thoughts are human, involving error, and since God, Spirit, is the only cause, they lack a divine cause. The temporal and material are not then creations of Spirit. They are but counterfeits of the spiritual and eternal. Transitory thoughts are the antipodes of everlasting Truth, though (by the supposition of opposite qualities) error must also say, “I am true.” But by this saying error, the lie, destroys itself.
Sin, sickness, and death are comprised in human material belief, and belong not to the divine Mind. They are without a real origin or existence. They have neither Principle nor permanence, but belong, with all that is material and temporal, to the nothingness of error, which simulates the creations of Truth. All creations of Spirit are eternal; but creations of matter must return to dust. Error supposes man to be both mental and material. Divine Science contradicts this postulate and maintains man’s spiritual identity.
Divine allness
We call the absence of Truth, error. Truth and error are unlike. In Science, Truth is divine, and the infinite God can have no unlikeness. Did God, Truth, create error? No! “Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?” God being everywhere and all-inclusive, how can He be absent or suggest the absence of omnipresence and omnipotence? How can there be more than all?
Neither understanding nor truth accompanies error, nor is error the offshoot of Mind. Evil calls itself something, when it is nothing. It saith, “I am man, but I am not the image and likeness of God;” whereas the Scriptures declare that man was made in God’s likeness.
Error unveiled
Error is false, mortal belief; it is illusion, without spiritual identity or foundation, and it has no real existence. The supposition that life, substance, and intelligence are in matter, or of it, is an error. Matter is neither a thing nor a person, but merely the objective supposition of Spirit’s opposite. The five material senses testify to truth and error as united in a mind both good and evil. Their false evidence will finally yield to Truth,–to the recognition of Spirit and of the spiritual creation.
Truth cannot be contaminated by error. The statement that Truth is real necessarily includes the correlated statement, that error, Truth’s unlikeness, is unreal.
The great conflict
The suppositional warfare between truth and error is only the mental conflict between the evidence of the spiritual senses and the testimony of the material senses, and this warfare between the Spirit and flesh will settle all questions through faith in and the understanding of divine Love.
Superstition and understanding can never combine. When the final physical and moral effects of Christian Science are fully apprehended, the conflict between truth and error, understanding and belief, Science and material sense, foreshadowed by the prophets and inaugurated by Jesus, will cease, and spiritual harmony reign. The lightnings and thunderbolts of error may burst and flash till the cloud is cleared and the tumult dies away in the distance. Then the raindrops of divinity refresh the earth. As St. Paul says: “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God” (of Spirit).
The chief stones in the temple
The chief stones in the temple of Christian Science are to be found in the following postulates: that Life is God, good, and not evil; that Soul is sinless, not to be found in the body; that Spirit is not, and cannot be, materialized; that Life is not subject to death; that the spiritual real man has no birth, no material life, and no death.
The Christ-element
Science reveals the glorious possibilities of immortal man, forever unlimited by the mortal senses. The Christ-element in the Messiah made him the Way-shower, Truth and Life.
The eternal Truth destroys what mortals seem to have learned from error, and man’s real existence as a child of God comes to light. Truth demonstrated is eternal life. Mortal man can never rise from the temporal debris of error, belief in sin, sickness, and death, until he learns that God is the only Life. The belief that life and sensation are in the body should be overcome by the understanding of what constitutes man as the image of God. Then Spirit will have overcome the flesh.
Wickedness is not man
A wicked mortal is not the idea of God. He is little else than the expression of error. To suppose that sin, lust, hatred, envy, hypocrisy, revenge, have life abiding in them, is a terrible mistake. Life and life’s idea, Truth and Truth’s idea, never make men sick, sinful, or mortal.
Death but an illusion
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 to be death is but a mortal illusion, for to the real man and the real universe there is no death-process.
The belief that matter has life results, by the universal law of mortal mind, in a belief in death. So man, tree, and flower are supposed to die; but the fact remains, that God’s universe is spiritual and immortal.
Spiritual offspring
The spiritual fact and the material belief of things are contradictions; but the spiritual is true, and therefore the material must be untrue. Life is not in matter. Therefore it cannot be said to pass out of matter. Matter and death are mortal illusions. Spirit and all things spiritual are the real and eternal.
Man is not the offspring of flesh, but of Spirit,–of Life, not of matter. Because Life is God, Life must be eternal, self-existent. Life is the everlasting I AM, the Being who was and is and shall be, whom nothing can erase.
Death no advantage
If the Principle, rule, and demonstration of man’s being are not in the least understood before what is termed death overtakes mortals, they will rise no higher spiritually in the scale of existence on account of that single experience, but will remain as material as before the transition, still seeking happiness through a material, instead of through a spiritual sense of life, and from selfish and inferior motives. That Life or Mind is finite and physical or is manifested through brain and nerves, is false. Hence Truth comes to destroy this error and its effects,–sickness, sin, and death. To the spiritual class, relates the Scripture: “On such the second death hath no power.”
Future purification
If the change called death destroyed the belief in sin, sickness, and death, happiness would be won at the moment of dissolution, and be forever permanent; but this is not so. Perfection is gained only by perfection. They who are unrighteous shall be unrighteous still, until in divine Science Christ, Truth, removes all ignorance and sin.
Sin is punished
The sin and error which possess us at the instant of death do not cease at that moment, but endure until the death of these errors. To be wholly spiritual, man must be sinless, and he becomes thus only when he reaches perfection. The murderer, though slain in the act, does not thereby forsake sin. He is no more spiritual for believing that his body died and learning that his cruel mind died not. His thoughts are no purer until evil is disarmed by good. His body is as material as his mind, and vice versa.
The suppositions that sin is pardoned while unforsaken, that happiness can be genuine in the midst of sin, that the so-called death of the body frees from sin, and that God’s pardon is aught but 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 this last call of wisdom cannot come till mortals have already yielded to each lesser call in the growth of Christian character. Mortals need not fancy that belief in the experience of death will awaken them to glorified being.
Salvation and probation
Universal salvation rests on progression and probation, and is unattainable without them. Heaven is not a locality, but a divine state of Mind in which all the manifestations of Mind are harmonious and immortal, because sin is not there and man is found having no righteousness of his own, but in possession of “the mind of the Lord,” as the Scripture says.
“In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.” So we read in Ecclesiastes. This text has been transformed into the popular proverb, “As the tree falls, so it must lie.” As man falleth asleep, so shall he awake. As death findeth mortal man, so shall he be after death, until probation and growth shall effect the needed change. Mind never becomes dust. No resurrection from the grave awaits Mind or Life, for the grave has no power over either.
Day of judgment
No final judgment awaits mortals, for the judgment day of wisdom comes hourly and continually, even the judgment by which mortal man is divested of all material error. As for spiritual error there is none.
When the last mortal fault is destroyed, then the final trump will sound which will end the battle of Truth with error and mortality; “but of that day and hour, knoweth no man.” Here prophecy pauses. Divine Science alone can compass the heights and depths of being and reveal the infinite.
Primitive error
Truth will be to us “the resurrection and the life” only as it destroys all error and the belief that Mind, the only immortality of man, can be fettered by the body, and Life be controlled by death. A sinful, sick, and dying mortal is not the likeness of God, the perfect and eternal.
Matter is the primitive belief of mortal mind, because this so-called mind has no cognizance of Spirit. To mortal mind, matter is substantial, and evil is real. The so-called senses of mortals are material. Hence the so-called life of mortals is dependent on matter.
Explaining the origin of material man and mortal mind, Jesus said: “Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father, the devil [evil], 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.”
Immortal man
This carnal material mentality, misnamed mind, is mortal. Therefore man would be annihilated, were it not for the spiritual real man’s indissoluble connection with his God, which Jesus brought to light. In his resurrection and ascension, Jesus showed that a mortal man is not the real essence of manhood, and that this unreal material mortality disappears in presence of the reality.
Elementary electricity
Electricity is not a vital fluid, but the least material form of illusive consciousness, – the material mindlessness, which forms no link between matter and Mind, and which destroys itself. Matter and mortal mind are but different strata of human belief. The grosser substratum is named matter or body; the more ethereal is called mind. This so-called mind and body is the illusion called a mortal, a mind in matter. In reality and in Science, both strata, mortal mind and mortal body, are false representatives of man.
The material so-called gases and forces are counterfeits of the spiritual forces of divine Mind, whose potency is Truth, whose attraction is Love, whose adhesion and cohesion are Life, perpetuating the eternal facts of being. Electricity is the sharp surplus of materiality which counterfeits the true essence of spirituality or truth,–the great difference being that electricity is not intelligent, while spiritual truth is Mind.
The counterfeit forces
There is no vapid fury of mortal mind–expressed in earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity – and this so-called mind is self-destroyed. The manifestations of evil, which counterfeit divine justice, are called in the Scriptures, “The anger of the Lord.” In reality, they show the self-destruction of error or matter and point to matter’s opposite, the strength and permanency of Spirit. Christian Science brings to light Truth and its supremacy, universal harmony, the entireness of God, good, and the nothingness of evil.
Instruments of error
The five physical senses are the avenues and instruments of human error, and they correspond with error. These senses indicate the common human belief, that life, substance, and intelligence are a unison of matter with Spirit. This is pantheism, and carries within itself the seeds of all error.
If man is both mind and matter, the loss of one finger would take away some quality and quantity of the man, for matter and man would be one.
Mortal verdict
The belief that matter thinks, sees, or feels is not more real than the belief that matter enjoys and suffers. This mortal belief, misnamed man, is error, saying: “Matter has intelligence and sensation. Nerves feel. Brain thinks and sins. The stomach can make a man cross. Injury can cripple and matter can kill man.” This verdict of the so-called material senses victimizes mortals, taught, as they are by physiology and pathology, to revere false testimony, even the errors that are destroyed by Truth through spiritual sense and Science.
Mythical pleasure
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 in them to be the father of mythology, in which matter is represented as divided into intelligent gods. Man’s genuine selfhood is recognizable only in what is good and true. Man is neither self-made nor made by mortals. God created man.
Severed members
The inebriate believes that there is pleasure in intoxication. The thief believes that he gains something by stealing, and the hypocrite that he is hiding himself. The Science of Mind corrects such mistakes, for Truth demonstrates the falsity of error.
Severed members
The belief that a severed limb is aching in the old location, the sensation seeming to be in nerves which are no longer there, is an added proof of the unreliability of physical testimony.
Mortals unlike immortals
God creates and governs the universe, including man. The universe is filled with spiritual ideas, which He evolves, and they are obedient to the Mind that makes them. Mortal mind would transform the spiritual into the material, and then recover man’s original self in order to escape from the mortality of this error. Mortals are not like immortals, created in God’s own image; but infinite Spirit being all, mortal consciousness will at last yield to the scientific fact and disappear, and the real sense of being, perfect and forever intact, will appear.
Goodness transparent
The manifestation of God through mortals is as light passing through the window-pane. The light and the glass never mingle, but as matter, the glass is less opaque than the walls. The mortal mind through which Truth appears most vividly is that one which has lost much materiality–much error–in order to become a better transparency for Truth. Then, like a cloud melting into thin vapor, it no longer hides the sun.
Brainology a myth
All that is called mortal thought is made up of error. The theoretical mind is matter, named brain, or material consciousness, the exact opposite of real Mind, or Spirit. Brainology teaches that mortals are created to suffer and die. It further teaches that when man is dead, his immortal soul is resurrected from death and mortality. Thus error theorizes that spirit is born of matter and returns to matter, and that man has a resurrection from dust; whereas Science unfolds the eternal verity, that man is the spiritual, eternal reflection of God.
Scientific purgation
Progress is born of experience. It is the ripening of mortal man, through which the mortal is dropped for the immortal. Either here or hereafter, suffering or Science must destroy all illusions regarding life and mind, and regenerate material sense and self. The old man with his deeds must be put off. Nothing sensual or sinful is immortal. The death of a false material sense and of sin, not the death of organic matter, is what reveals man and Life, harmonious, real, and eternal.
The so-called pleasures and pains of matter perish, and they must go out under the blaze of Truth, spiritual sense, and the actuality of being. Mortal belief must lose all satisfaction in error and sin in order to part with them.
Whether mortals will learn this sooner or later, and how long they will suffer the pangs of destruction, depends upon the tenacity of error.
Mixed testimony
The knowledge obtained from the corporeal senses leads to sin and death. When the evidence of Spirit and matter, Truth and error, seems to commingle, it rests upon foundations which time is wearing away. Mortal mind judges by the testimony of the material senses, until Science obliterates this false testimony. An improved belief is one step out of error, and aids in taking the next step and in understanding the situation in Christian Science.
Belief an autocrat
Mortal belief is a liar from the beginning, not deserving power. It says to mortals, “You are wretched!” and they think they are so; and nothing can change this state, until the belief changes. Mortal belief says, “You are happy!” and mortals are so; and no circumstance can alter the situation, until the belief on this subject changes. Human belief says to mortals, “You are sick!” and this testimony manifests itself on the body as sickness. 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 a health-belief or a belief in sickness affects the physical condition.
Self-improvement
Erroneous belief is destroyed by truth. Change the evidence, and that disappears which before seemed real to this false belief, and the human consciousness rises higher. Thus the reality of being is attained and man found to be immortal. The only fact concerning any material concept is, that it is neither scientific nor eternal, but subject to change and dissolution.
Faith higher than belief
Faith is higher and more spiritual than belief. It is a chrysalis state of human thought, in which spiritual evidence, contradicting the testimony of material sense, begins to appear, and Truth, the ever-present, is becoming understood. Human thoughts have their degrees of comparison. Some thoughts are better than others. A belief in Truth is better than a belief in error, but no mortal testimony is founded on the divine rock. Mortal testimony can be shaken. Until belief becomes faith, and faith becomes spiritual understanding, human thought has little relation to the actual or divine.
A mortal belief fulfils its own conditions. Sickness, sin, and death are the vague realities of human conclusions. Life, Truth, and Love are the realities of divine Science. They dawn in faith and glow full-orbed in spiritual understanding. As a cloud hides the sun it cannot extinguish, so false belief silences for a while the voice of immutable harmony, but false belief cannot destroy Science armed with faith, hope, and fruition.
Truth’s witness
What is termed material sense can report only a mortal temporary sense of things, whereas spiritual sense can bear witness only to Truth. To material sense, the unreal is the real until this sense is corrected by Christian Science.
Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality. Material sense expresses the belief that mind is in matter. This human belief, alternating between a sense of pleasure and pain, hope and fear, life and death, never reaches beyond the boundary of the mortal or the unreal. When the real is attained, which is announced by Science, joy is no longer a trembler, nor is hope a cheat. Spiritual ideas, like numbers and notes, start from Principle, and admit no materialistic beliefs. Spiritual ideas lead up to their divine origin, God, and to the spiritual sense of being.
Thought-angels
Angels are not etherealized human beings, evolving animal qualities in their wings; but they are celestial visitants, flying on spiritual, not material, pinions. Angels are pure thoughts from God, winged with Truth and Love, no matter what their individualism may be. Human conjecture confers upon angels its own forms of thought, marked with superstitious outlines, making them human creatures with suggestive feathers; but this is only fancy. It has behind it no more reality than has the sculptor’s thought when he carves his “Statue of Liberty,” which embodies his conception of an unseen quality or condition, but which has no physical antecedent reality save in the artist’s own observation and “chambers of imagery.”
Our Angelic messengers
My angels are exalted thoughts, appearing at the door of some sepulchre, in which human belief has buried its fondest earthly hopes. With white fingers they point upward to a new and glorified trust, to higher ideals of life and its joys. Angels are God’s representatives. These upward-soaring beings never lead towards self, sin, or materiality, but guide to the divine Principle of all good, whither every real individuality, image, or likeness of God, gathers. By giving earnest heed to these spiritual guides they tarry with us, and we entertain “angels unawares.”
Knowledge and Truth
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 the knowledge thus obtained to be untrue and dangerous, since “the tree is known by his fruit”?
Truth never destroys God’s idea. Truth is spiritual, eternal substance, which cannot destroy the right reflection. Corporeal sense, or error, may seem to hide Truth, health, harmony, and Science, as the mist obscures the sun or the mountain; but Science, the sunshine of Truth, will melt away the shadow and reveal the celestial peaks.
Old and new man
If man were solely a creature of the material senses, he would have no eternal Principle and would be mutable and mortal. Human logic is awry when it attempts to draw correct spiritual conclusions regarding life from matter. Finite sense has no true appreciation of infinite Principle, God, or of His infinite image or reflection, man. The mirage, which makes trees and cities seem to be where they are not, illustrates the illusion of material man, who cannot be the image of God.
So far as the scientific statement as to man is understood, it can be proved and will bring to light the true reflection of God–the real man, or the new man (as St. Paul has it).
The tares and wheat
The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and real. The mutable and imperfect never touch the immutable and perfect. The inharmonious and self-destructive never touch the harmonious and self-existent. These opposite qualities are the tares and wheat, which never really mingle, though (to mortal sight) they grow side by side until the harvest; then, Science separates the wheat from the tares, through the realization of God as ever present and of man as reflecting the divine likeness.
The divine reflection
Spirit is God, Soul; therefore Soul is not in matter. If Spirit were in matter, God would have no representative, and matter would be identical with God. The theory that soul, spirit, intelligence, inhabits matter is taught by the schools. This theory is unscientific. The universe reflects and expresses the divine substance or Mind; therefore God is seen only in the spiritual universe and spiritual man, as the sun is seen in the ray of light which goes out from it. God is revealed only in that which reflects Life, Truth, Love, yea, which manifests God’s attributes and power, even as the human likeness thrown upon the mirror, repeats the color, form, and action of the person in front of the mirror.
Few persons comprehend what Christian Science means by the word reflection. To himself, mortal and material man seems to be substance, but his sense of substance involves error and therefore is material, temporal.
On the other hand, the immortal, spiritual man is really substantial, and reflects the eternal substance, or Spirit, which mortals hope for. He reflects the divine, which constitutes the only real and eternal entity. This reflection seems to mortal sense transcendental, because the spiritual man’s substantiality transcends mortal vision and is revealed only through divine Science.
Inverted images and ideas
As God is substance and man is the divine image and likeness, man should wish for, and in reality has, only the substance of good, the substance of Spirit, not matter. The belief that man has any other substance, or mind, is not spiritual and breaks the First Commandment, Thou shalt have one God, one Mind. Mortal man seems to himself to be material substance, while man is “image” (idea). Delusion, sin, disease, and death arise from the false testimony of material sense, which, from a supposed standpoint outside the focal distance of infinite Spirit, presents an inverted image of Mind and substance with everything turned upside down.
This falsity presupposes soul to be an unsubstantial dweller in material forms, and man to be material instead of spiritual. Immortality is not bounded by mortality.
Soul is not compassed by finiteness. Principle is not to be found in fragmentary ideas.
Identity not lost
The material body and mind are temporal, but the real man is spiritual and eternal. The identity of the real man is not lost, but found through this explanation; for the conscious infinitude of existence and of all identity is thereby discerned and remains unchanged. It is impossible that man should lose aught that is real, when God is all and eternally his. The notion that mind is in matter, and that the so-called pleasures and pains, the birth, sin, sickness, and death of matter, are real, is a mortal belief; and this belief is all that will ever be lost.
Definition of man
Continuing our definition of man, let us remember that harmonious and immortal man has existed forever, and is always beyond and above the mortal illusion of any life, substance and intelligence as existent in matter. This statement is based on fact, not fable. The Science of being reveals man as perfect, even as the Father is perfect, because the Soul, or Mind, of the spiritual man is God, the divine Principle of all being, and because this real man is governed by Soul instead of sense, by the law of Spirit, not by the so-called laws of matter.
God is Love. He is therefore the divine, infinite Principle, called Person or God. Man’s true consciousness is in the mental, not in any bodily or personal likeness to Spirit. Indeed, the body presents no proper likeness of divinity, though mortal sense would fain have us so believe.
Mental propagation
Even in Christian Science, reproduction by Spirit’s individual ideas is but the reflection of the creative power of the divine Principle of those ideas. The reflection, through mental manifestation, of the multitudinous forms of Mind which people the realm of the real is controlled by Mind, the Principle governing the reflection. Multiplication of God’s children comes from no power of propagation in matter, it is the reflection of Spirit.
The minutiae of lesser individualities reflect the one divine individuality and are comprehended in and formed by Spirit, not by material sensation. Whatever reflects Mind, Life, Truth, and Love, is spiritually conceived and brought forth; but the statement that man is conceived and evolved both spiritually and materially, or by both God and man, contradicts this eternal truth. All the vanity of the ages can never make both these contraries true. Divine Science lays the axe at the root of the illusion that life, or mind, is formed by or is in the material body, and Science will eventually destroy this illusion through the self-destruction of all error and the beatified understanding of the Science of Life.
Error defined
The belief that pain and pleasure, life and death, holiness and unholiness, mingle in man,–that mortal, material man is the likeness of God and is himself a creator,–is a fatal error.
Man’s entity spiritual
God, without the image and likeness of Himself, would be a nonentity, or Mind unexpressed. He would be without a witness or proof of His own nature. Spiritual man is the image or idea of God, an idea which cannot be lost nor separated from its divine Principle. When the evidence before the material senses yielded to spiritual sense, the apostle declared that nothing could alienate him from God, from the sweet sense and presence of Life and Truth.
Man inseparable from Love
It is ignorance and false belief, based on a material sense of things, which hide spiritual beauty and goodness. Understanding this, Paul said: “Neither death, nor life, . . . nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.” This is the doctrine of Christian Science: that divine Love cannot be deprived of its manifestation, or object; that joy cannot be turned into sorrow, for sorrow is not the master of joy; that good can never produce evil; that matter can never produce mind nor life result in death. The perfect man–governed by God, his perfect Principle–is sinless and eternal.
Harmony natural
Harmony is produced by its Principle, is controlled by it and abides with it. Divine Principle is the Life of man. Man’s happiness is not, therefore, at the disposal of physical sense. Truth is not contaminated by error. Harmony in man is as beautiful as in music, and discord is unnatural, unreal.
The science of music governs tones. If mortals caught harmony through material sense, they would lose harmony, if time or accident robbed them of material sense. To be master of chords and discords, the science of music must be understood. Left to the decisions of material sense, music is liable to be misapprehended and lost in confusion. Controlled by belief, instead of understanding, music is, must be, imperfectly expressed. So man, not understanding the Science of being,–thrusting aside his divine Principle as incomprehensible,–is abandoned to conjectures, left in the hands of ignorance, placed at the disposal of illusions, subjected to material sense which is discord. A discontented, discordant mortal is no more a man than discord is music.
Human reflection
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 Maker, reflects the central light of being, the invisible God. As there is no corporeality in the mirrored form, which is but a reflection, so man, like all things real, reflects God, his divine Principle, not in a mortal body.
Gender also is a quality, not of God, but a characteristic of mortal mind. The verity that God’s image is not a creator, though he reflects the creation of Mind, God, constitutes the underlying reality of reflection. “Then answered Jesus and said unto them: Verily, verily I say unto you, the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.”
Inverted images
The inverted images presented by the senses, the deflections of matter as opposed to the Science of spiritual reflection, are all unlike Spirit, God. In the illusion of life that is here to-day and gone to-morrow, man would be wholly mortal, were it not that Love, the divine Principle that obtains in divine Science, destroys all error and brings immortality to light. Because man is the reflection of his Maker, he is not subject to birth, growth, maturity, decay. These mortal dreams are of human origin, not divine.
Jewish traditions
The Sadducees reasoned falsely about the resurrection, but not so blindly as the Pharisees, who believed error to be as immortal as Truth. The Pharisees thought that they could raise the spiritual from the material. They would first make life result in death, and then resort to death to reproduce spiritual life. Jesus taught them how death was to be overcome by spiritual Life, and demonstrated this beyond cavil.
Divinity not childless
Life demonstrates Life. The immortality of Soul makes man immortal. If God, who is Life, were parted for a moment from His reflection, man, during that moment there would be no divinity reflected. The Ego would be unexpressed, and the Father would be childless,–no Father.
If Life or Soul and its representative, man, unite for a period and then are separated as by a law of divorce to be brought together again at some uncertain future time and in a manner unknown,–and this is the general religious opinion of mankind,–we are left without a rational proof of immortality. But man cannot be separated for an instant from God, if man reflects God. Thus Science proves man’s existence to be intact.
Thought-forms
The myriad forms of mortal thought, made manifest as matter, are not more distinct nor real to the material senses than are the Soul-created forms to spiritual sense, which cognizes Life as permanent. Undisturbed amid the jarring testimony of the material senses, Science, still enthroned, is unfolding to mortals the immutable, harmonious, divine Principle, – is unfolding Life and the universe, ever present and eternal.
God’s man, spiritually created, is not material and mortal.
The serpent’s whisper
The parent of all human discord was the Adam-dream, the deep sleep, in which originated the delusion that life and intelligence proceeded from and passed into matter. This pantheistic error, or so-called serpent, insists still upon the opposite of Truth, saying, “Ye shall be as gods;” that is, I will make error as real and eternal as Truth.
Evil still affirms itself to be mind, and declares that there is more than one intelligence or God. It says: “There shall be lords and gods many. I declare that God makes evil minds and evil spirits, and that I aid Him. Truth shall change sides and be unlike Spirit. I will put spirit into what I call matter, and matter shall seem to have life as much as God, Spirit, who is the only life.”
Bad results from error
This error has proved itself to be error. Its life is found to be not Life, but only a transient, false sense of an existence which ends in death. Error charges its lie to Truth and says: “The Lord knows it. He has made man immortal and material, out of matter instead of Spirit.” Thus error partakes of its own nature and utters its own falsities. If we regard matter as intelligent, and Mind as both good and evil, every sin or supposed material pain and pleasure seems normal, a part of God’s creation, and so weighs against our course Spiritward.
Higher statutes
Truth has no beginning. The divine Mind is the Soul of man, and gives man dominion over all things. Man was not created from a material basis, nor bidden to obey material laws which Spirit never made; his province is in spiritual statutes, in the higher law of Mind.
The great question
Above error’s awful din, blackness, and chaos, the voice of Truth still calls: “Adam, where art thou? Consciousness, 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 that there is and can be but one God, and keeping His commandment?” Until the lesson is learned that God is the only Mind governing man, mortal belief will be afraid as it was in the beginning, and will hide from the demand, “Where art thou?” This awful demand, “Adam, where art thou?” is met by the admission from the head, heart, stomach, blood, nerves, etc.: “Lo, here I am, looking for happiness and life in the body, but finding only an illusion, a blending of false claims, false pleasure, pain, sin, sickness, and death.”
The Soul-inspired patriarchs heard the voice of Truth, and talked with God as consciously as man talks with man.
Wrestling of Jacob
Jacob was alone, wrestling with error,–struggling with a mortal sense of life, substance, and intelligence as existent in matter with its false pleasures and pains,–when an angel, a message from Truth and Love, appeared to him and smote the sinew, or strength, of his error, till he saw its unreality; and Truth, being thereby understood, gave him spiritual strength in this Peniel of divine Science. Then said the spiritual evangel: “Let me go, for the day breaketh;” that is, the light of Truth and Love dawns upon thee. But the patriarch, perceiving his error and his need of help, did not loosen his hold upon this glorious light until his nature was transformed. When Jacob was asked, “What is thy name?” he straightway answered; and then his name was changed to Israel, for “as a prince” had he prevailed and had “power with God and with men.” Then Jacob questioned his deliverer, “Tell me, I pray thee, thy name;” but this appellation was withheld, for the messenger was not a corporeal being, but a nameless, incorporeal impartation of divine Love to man, which, to use the word of the Psalmist, restored his Soul,–gave him the spiritual sense of being and rebuked his material sense.
Israel the new name
The result of Jacob’s struggle thus appeared. He had conquered material error with the understanding of Spirit and of spiritual power. This 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 through earnest striving followed his demonstration of the power of Spirit over the material senses; and the children of earth who followed his example were to be called the children of Israel, until the Messiah should rename them. If these children should go astray, and forget that Life is God, good, and that good is not in elements which are not spiritual,–thus losing the divine power which heals the sick and sinning,–they were to be brought back through great tribulation, to be renamed in Christian Science and led to deny material sense, or mind in matter, even as the gospel teaches.
Life never structural
The Science of being shows it to be impossible for infinite Spirit or Soul to be in a finite body or for man to have an intelligence separate from his Maker. It is a self-evident error to suppose that there can be such a reality as organic animal or vegetable life, when such so-called life always ends in death. Life is never for a moment extinct. Therefore it is never structural nor organic, and is never absorbed nor limited by its own formations.
Thought seen as substance
The artist is not in his painting. The picture is the artist’s thought objectified. The human belief fancies that it delineates thought on matter, but what is matter? Did it exist prior to thought? Matter is made up of supposititious mortal mind-force; but all might is divine Mind. Thought will finally be understood and seen in all form, substance, and color, but without material accompaniments. The potter is not in the clay; else the clay would have power over the potter. God is His own infinite Mind, and expresses all.
The central intelligence
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 God, untouched by sin and death,–as the central life and intelligence around which circle harmoniously all things in the systems of Mind.
Soul imperishable
Soul changeth not. We are commonly taught that there is a human soul which sins and is spiritually lost,–that soul may be lost, and yet be immortal. If Soul could sin, Spirit, Soul, would be flesh instead of Spirit. It is the belief of the flesh and of material sense which sins. If Soul sinned, Soul would die. Sin is the element of self-destruction, and spiritual death is oblivion. If there was sin in Soul, the annihilation of Spirit would be inevitable. The only Life is Spirit, and if Spirit should lose Life as God, good, then Spirit, which has no other existence, would be annihilated.
Mind is God, and God is not seen by material sense, because Mind is Spirit, which material sense cannot discern. There is neither growth, maturity, nor decay in Soul. These changes are the mutations of material sense, the varying clouds of mortal belief, which hide the truth of being.
What we term mortal mind or carnal mind, dependent on matter for manifestation, is not Mind. God is Mind: all that Mind, God, is, or hath made, is good, and He made all. Hence evil is not made and is not real.
Sin only of the flesh
Soul is immortal because it is Spirit, which has no element of self-destruction. is man lost spiritually? No, he can only lose a sense material. All sin is of the flesh. It cannot be spiritual. Sin exists here or hereafter only so long as the illusion of mind in matter remains. It is a sense of sin, and not a sinful soul, which is lost. Evil is destroyed by the sense of good.
Soul impeccable
Through false estimates of soul as dwelling in sense and of mind as dwelling in matter, belief strays into a sense of temporary loss or absence of soul, spiritual truth. This state of error is the mortal dream of life and substance as existent in matter, and is directly opposite to the immortal reality of being. So long as we believe that soul can sin or that immortal Soul is in mortal body, we can never understand the Science of being. When humanity does understand this Science, it will become the law of Life to man,–even the higher law of Soul, which prevails over material sense through harmony and immortality.
The objects cognized by the physical senses have not the reality of substance. They are only what mortal belief calls them. Matter, sin, and mortality lose all supposed consciousness or claim to life or existence, as mortals lay off a false sense of life, substance, and intelligence. but the spiritual, eternal man is not touched by these phases of mortality.
Sense-dreams
How true it is that whatever is learned through material sense must be lost because such so-called knowledge is reversed by the spiritual facts of being in Science. That which material sense calls intangible, is found to be substance. What to material sense seems substance, becomes nothingness, as the sensedream vanishes and reality appears.
The senses regard a corpse, not as man, but simply as matter. People say, “Man is dead;” but this death is the departure of a mortal’s mind, not of matter. The matter is still there. The belief of that mortal that he must die occasioned his departure; yet you say that matter has caused his death.
Vain ecstasies
People go into ecstasies over the sense of a corporeal Jehovah, though with scarcely a spark of love in their hearts; yet God is love, and without Love, God, immortality cannot appear. Mortals try to believe without understanding Truth; yet God is Truth. Mortals claim that death is inevitable; but man’s eternal Principle is ever-present life. Mortals believe in a finite personal God; while God is infinite Love, which must be unlimited.
Man-made theories
Our theories are based on finite premises, which cannot penetrate beyond matter. A personal sense of God and of man’s capabilities necessarily limits faith and hinders spiritual understanding. It divides faith and understanding between matter and Spirit, the finite and the infinite, and so turns away from the intelligent and divine healing Principle to the inanimate drug.
The one anointed
Jesus’ spiritual origin and his demonstration of divine Principle richly endowed him and entitled him to sonship in Science. He 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 Godcrowned or the divinely royal man, as it is said of him in the first chapter of Hebrews:
Therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee With the oil of gladness above thy fellows.
With this agrees another passage in the same chapter, which refers to the Son as “the brightness of His [God’s] glory, and the express [expressed] image of His person [infinite Mind].” It is noteworthy that the phrase “express image” in the Common Version is, in the Greek Testament, character. Using this word in its higher meaning, we may assume that the author of this remarkable epistle regarded Christ as the Son of God, the royal reflection of the infinite; and the cause given for the exaltation of Jesus, Mary’s son, was that he “loved righteousness and hated iniquity.” The passage is made even clearer in the translation of the late George R. Noyes, D.D.: “Who, being a brightness from His glory, and an image of His being.”
Jesus the Scientist
Jesus of Nazareth was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe. He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause. To accommodate himself to immature ideas of spiritual power,–for spirituality was pos sessed only in a limited degree even by his disciples, Jesus called the body, which by spiritual 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 (his further spiritual exaltation), Jesus waited until the mortal or fleshly sense had relinquished the belief of substance-matter, and spiritual sense had quenched all earthly yearnings. Thus he found the eternal Ego, and proved that he and the Father were inseparable as God and His reflection or spiritual man. Our Master gained the solution of being, demonstrating the existence of but one Mind without a second or equal.
The bodily resurrection
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 spoke of reproducing his body,–knowing, as he did, that Mind was the builder,–and said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” they thought that he meant their material temple instead of his body. To such materialists, the real man seemed a spectre, unseen and unfamiliar, and the body, which they laid in a sepulchre, seemed to be substance. This materialism lost sight of the true Jesus; but the faithful Mary saw him, and he presented to her, more than ever before, the true idea of Life and substance.
Opposition of materialists
Because of mortals’ 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 he uttered the demands of its divine Principle, Truth and Love, the more odious he became to sinners and to those who, depending on doctrines and material laws to save them from sin and sickness, were submissive to death as being in supposed accord with the inevitable law of life. Jesus proved them wrong by his resurrection, and said: “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
Hebrew theology
That saying 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 to them. He knew of but one Mind and laid no claim to any other. He knew that the Ego was Mind instead of body and that matter, sin, and evil were not Mind; and his understanding of this divine Science brought upon him the anathemas of the age.
The true sonship
The opposite and false views of the people hid from their sense Christ’s sonship with God. They could not discern his spiritual existence. Their carnal minds were at enmity with it. Their thoughts were filled with mortal error, instead of with God’s spiritual idea as presented by Christ Jesus. The likeness of God we lose sight of through sin, which beclouds the spiritual sense of Truth; and we realize this likeness only when we subdue sin and prove man’s heritage, the liberty of the sons of God.
Immaculate conception
Jesus’ spiritual origin and understanding enabled him to demonstrate the facts of being,–to prove irrefutably how spiritual Truth destroys material error, heals sickness, and overcomes death. The divine conception of Jesus pointed to this truth and presented an illustration of creation. The history of Jesus shows him to have been more spiritual than all other earthly personalities.
Jesus as mediator
Wearing in part a human form (that is, as it seemed to mortal view), being conceived by a human mother, Jesus was the mediator between Spirit and the flesh, between Truth and error. Explaining and demonstrating the way of divine Science, he became the way of salvation to all who accepted his word. From him mortals may learn how to escape from evil. The real man being linked by Science to his Maker, mortals need only turn from sin and lose sight of mortal selfhood to find Christ, the real man and his relation to God, and to recognize the divine sonship. Christ, Truth, was demonstrated through Jesus to prove the power of Spirit over the flesh,–to show that Truth is made manifest by its effects upon the human mind and body, healing sickness and destroying sin.
Spiritual government
Jesus represented Christ, the true idea of God. Hence the warfare between this spiritual idea and perfunctory religion, between spiritual 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, or the Christman, rose higher to human view because of the crucifixion, and thus proved that truth was the master of death. Christ presents the indestructible man, whom Spirit creates, constitutes, and governs. Christ illustrates that blending with God, his divine Principle, which gives man dominion over all the earth.
Deadness in sin
The spiritual idea of God, as presented by Jesus, was scourged in person, and its Principle was rejected. That man was accounted a criminal who could prove God’s divine power by healing the sick, casting out evils, spiritualizing materialistic beliefs, and raising the dead,–those dead in trespasses and sins, satisfied with the flesh, resting on the basis of matter, blind to the possibilities of Spirit and its correlative truth.
Jesus uttered things which had been “secret from the foundation of the world,”–since material knowledge usurped the throne of the creative divine Principle, insisted on the might of matter, the force of falsity, the insignificance of spirit, and proclaimed an anthropomorphic God.
The cup of Jesus
Whosoever lives most the life of Jesus in this age and declares best the power of Christian Science, will drink of his Master’s cup. Resistance to Truth will haunt his steps, and he will incur the hatred of sinners, till “wisdom is justified of her children.” These blessed benedictions rest upon Jesus’ followers: “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you;” “Lo, I am with you alway,”–that is, not only in all time, but in all ways and conditions.
The individuality of man is no less tangible because it is spiritual and because his life is not at the mercy of matter. The understanding of his spiritual individuality makes man more real, more formidable in truth, and enables him to conquer sin, disease, and death. Our Lord and Master presented himself to his disciples after his resurrection from the grave, as the self-same Jesus whom they had loved before the tragedy on Calvary.
Material skepticism
To the materialistic Thomas, looking for the ideal Saviour in matter instead of in Spirit and to the testimony of the material 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 dull and doubting disciple Jesus remained a fleshly reality, so long as the Master remained an inhabitant of the earth. Nothing but a display of matter could make existence real to Thomas. For him to believe in matter was no task, but for him to conceive of the substantiality of Spirit to know that nothing can efface Mind and immortality, in which Spirit reigns–was more difficult.
What the senses originate
Corporeal senses define diseases as realities; but the Scriptures declare that God made all, even while the corporeal senses are saying that matter causes disease and the divine Mind cannot or will not heal it. The material senses originate and support all that is material, untrue, selfish, or debased. They would put soul into soil, life into limbo, and doom all things to decay. We must silence this lie of material sense with the truth of spiritual sense. We must cause the error to cease that brought the belief of sin and death and would efface the pure sense of omnipotence.
Sickness as discord
Is the sick man sinful above all others? No! but so far as he is discordant, he is not the image of God. Weary of their material beliefs, from which comes so much suffering, invalids grow more spiritual, as the error – or belief that life is in matter yields to the reality of spiritual Life.
The Science of Mind denies the error of sensation in matter, and heals with Truth. Medical science treats disease as though disease were real, therefore right, and attempts to heal it with matter. If disease is right it is wrong to heal it. Material methods are temporary, and are not adapted to elevate mankind.
The governor is not subjected to the governed. In Science man is governed by God, divine Principle, as numbers are controlled and proved by His laws. Intelligence does not originate in numbers, but is manifested through them. The body does not include soul, but manifests mortality, a false sense of soul. The delusion that there is life in matter has no kinship with the Life supernal.
Unscientific introspection
Science depicts disease as error, as matter versus Mind, and error reversed as subserving the facts of health. To calculate one’s life-prospects from a material basis, would infringe upon spiritual law and misguide human hope. Having faith in the divine Principle of Health and spiritually understanding God, sustains man under all circumstances; whereas the lower appeal to the general faith in material means (commonly called nature) must yield to the allmight of infinite Spirit.
Throughout the infinite cycles of eternal existence, Spirit and matter neither concur in man nor in the universe.
God the only Mind
The varied doctrines and theories which presuppose life and intelligence to exist in matter are so many ancient and modern mythologies. Mystery, miracle, sin, and death will disappear when it becomes fairly understood that the divine Mind controls man and man has no Mind but God.
Scriptures misinterpreted
The divine Science taught in the original language of the Bible came through inspiration, and needs inspiration to be understood. Hence the misapprehension of the spiritual meaning of the Bible, and the misinterpretation of the Word in some instances by uninspired writers, who only wrote down what an inspired teacher had said. A misplaced word changes the sense and misstates the Science of the Scriptures, as, for instance, to name Love as merely an attribute of God; but we can by special and proper capitalization speak of the love of Love, meaning by that what the beloved disciple meant in one of his epistles, when he said, “God is love.” Likewise we can speak of the truth of Truth and of the life of Life, for Christ plainly declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
Interior meaning
Metaphors abound in the Bible, and names are often expressive of spiritual ideas. The most distinguished theologians in Europe and America agree that the Scriptures have both a spiritual and literal meaning. In Smith’s Bible Dictionary it is said: “The spiritual interpretation of Scripture must rest upon both the literal and moral;” and in the learned article on Noah in the same work, the familiar text, Genesis vi. 3, “And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh,” is quoted as follows, from the original Hebrew: “And 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.” Here the original text declares plainly the spiritual fact of being, even man’s eternal and harmonious existence as image, idea, instead of matter (however transcendental such a thought appears), and avers that this fact is not forever to be humbled by the belief that man is flesh and matter, for according to that error man is mortal.
Job, on the resurrection
The one important interpretation of Scripture is the spiritual. For example, 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 even if disease and worms destroyed his body, yet in the latter days he should stand in celestial perfection before Elohim, still clad in material flesh, – an interpretation which is just the opposite of the true, as may be seen by studying the book of Job. As Paul says, in his first epistle to the Corinthians, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”
Fear of the serpent overcome
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, he saw it become a serpent, Moses fled before it; but wisdom bade him come back and handle the serpent, and then Moses’ fear departed. In this incident was seen the actuality of Science. Matter was shown to be a belief only. The serpent, evil, under wisdom’s bidding, was destroyed through understanding divine Science, and this proof was a staff upon which to lean. The illusion of Moses lost its power to alarm him, when he discovered that what he apparently saw was really but a phase of mortal belief.
Leprosy healed
It was scientifically demonstrated that leprosy was a creation of mortal mind and not a condition of matter, when Moses first put his hand into his bosom and drew it forth white as snow with the dread disease, and presently restored his hand to its natural condition by the same simple process. God had lessened Moses’ fear by this proof in divine Science, and the inward voice became to him the voice of God, which said: “It shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, neither hearken to the voice of the first sign, that they will believe the voice of the latter sign.” And so it was in the coming centuries, when the Science of being was demonstrated by Jesus, who 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 evils in proof of the supremacy of Mind.
Standpoints changed
When understanding changes the standpoints of life and intelligence from a material to a spiritual basis, we shall gain the reality of Life, the control of Soul over sense, and we shall perceive Christianity, or Truth, in its divine Principle. This must be the climax before harmonious and immortal man is obtained and his capabilities revealed. It is highly important–in view of the immense work to be accomplished before this recognition of divine Science can come–to turn our thoughts towards divine Principle, that finite belief may be prepared to relinquish its error.
Saving the inebriate
Man’s wisdom finds no satisfaction in sin, since God has sentenced sin to suffer. The necromancy of yesterday foreshadowed the mesmerism and hypnotism of to-day. The drunkard thinks he enjoys drunkenness, and you cannot make the inebriate leave his besottedness, until his physical sense of pleasure yields to a higher sense. Then he turns from his cups, as the startled dreamer who wakens from an incubus incurred through the pains of distorted sense. A man who likes to do wrong–finding pleasure in it and refraining from it only through fear of consequences–is neither a temperate man nor a reliable religionist.
Uses of suffering
The sharp experiences of belief in the supposititious life of matter, as well as our disappointments and ceaseless woes, turn us like tired children to the arms of divine Love. Then we begin to learn Life in divine Science. Without this process of weaning, “Canst thou by searching 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 they will not be able to glean from Christian Science the facts of being without striving for them. This strife consists in the endeavor to forsake error of every kind and to possess no other consciousness but good.
A bright outlook
Through the wholesome chastisements of Love, we are helped onward in the march towards righteousness, peace, and purity, which are the landmarks of Science. Beholding the infinite tasks of truth, we pause,–wait on God. Then we push onward, until boundless thought walks enraptured, and conception unconfined is winged to reach the divine glory.
Need and supply
In order to apprehend more, we must put into practice what we already know. We must recollect that Truth is demonstrable when understood, and that good is not understood until demonstrated. If “faithful over a few things,” we shall be made rulers over many; but the one unused talent decays and is lost. When the sick or the sinning awake to realize their need of what they have not, they will be receptive of divine Science, which gravitates towards Soul and away from material sense, removes thought from the body, and elevates even mortal mind to the contemplation of something better than disease or sin. The true idea of God gives the true understanding of Life and Love, robs the grave of victory, takes away all sin and the delusion that there are other minds, and destroys mortality.
Childlike receptivity
The effects of Christian Science are not so much seen as felt. It is the “still, small voice” of Truth uttering itself. We are either turning away from this utterance, or we are listening to it and going up higher. Willingness to become as a little child and to leave the old for the new, renders thought receptive of the advanced idea. Gladness to leave the false landmarks and joy to see them disappear,–this disposition helps to precipitate the ultimate harmony. The purification of sense and self is a proof of progress. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”
Narrow pathway
Unless the harmony and immortality of man are becoming more apparent, we are not gaining the true idea of God; and the body will reflect what governs it, whether it be Truth or error, understanding or belief, Spirit or matter. Therefore “acquaint now thyself with Him, and be at peace.” Be watchful, sober, and vigilant. The way is straight and narrow, which leads to the understanding that God is the only Life. It is a warfare with the flesh, in which we must conquer sin, sickness, and death, either here or hereafter,–certainly before we can reach the goal of Spirit, or life in God.
Paul’s enlightenment
Paul was not at first a disciple of Jesus but a persecutor of Jesus’ followers. When the truth first appeared to him in Science, Paul was made blind, and his blindness was felt; but spiritual light soon enabled him to follow the example and teachings of Jesus, healing the sick and preaching Christianity throughout Asia Minor, Greece, and even in imperial Rome.
Paul writes, “If Christ [Truth] be not risen, then is our preaching vain.” That is, if the idea of the supremacy of Spirit, which is the true conception of being, come not to your thought, you cannot be benefited by what I say.
Abiding in Life
Jesus said substantially, “He that believeth in me shall not see death.” That is, he who perceives the true idea of Life loses his belief in death. He who has the true idea of good loses all sense of evil, and by reason of this is being ushered into the undying realities of Spirit. Such a one abideth in Life, life obtained not of the body incapable of supporting life, but of Truth, unfolding its own immortal idea. Jesus gave the true idea of being, which results in infinite blessings to mortals.
Indestructible being
In Colossians (iii. 4) Paul writes: “When Christ, who is 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 man be found in God’s image. The absolute meaning of the apostolic words is this: Then shall man be found, in His likeness, perfect as the Father, indestructible in Life, “hid with Christ in God,”–with Truth in divine Love, where human sense hath not seen man.
Consecration required
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, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” But he, who is begotten of the beliefs of the flesh and serves them, can never reach in this world the divine heights of our Lord. The time cometh when the spiritual origin of man, the divine Science which 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 comprehended it not.” A false sense of life, substance, and mind hides the divine possibilities, and conceals scientific demonstration.
Loving God supremely
If we wish to follow Christ, Truth, it must be in the way of God’s appointing. Jesus said, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also.” He, who would reach the source and find the divine remedy for every ill, must not try to climb the hill of Science by some other road. All nature teaches God’s love to man, but man cannot love God supremely and set his whole affections on spiritual things, while loving the material or trusting in it more than in the spiritual.
We must forsake the foundation of material systems, however time-honored, if we would gain the Christ as our only Saviour. Not partially, but fully, the great healer of mortal mind is the healer of the body.
The purpose and motive to live aright can be gained now. 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, your Father will open the way. “Who did hinder you, that ye should not obey the truth?”
Conversion of Saul
Saul of Tarsus beheld the way–the Christ, or Truth – only when his uncertain sense of right yielded to a spiritual sense, which is always right. Then the man was changed. Thought assumed a nobler outlook, and his life became more spiritual. He learned the wrong that he had done in persecuting Christians, whose religion he had not understood, and in humility he took the new name of Paul. He beheld for the first time the true idea of Love, and learned a lesson in divine Science.
Reform comes by understanding that there is no abiding pleasure in evil, and also by gaining an affection for good according to Science, which reveals the immortal fact that neither pleasure nor pain, appetite nor passion, can exist in or of matter, while divine Mind can and does destroy the false beliefs of pleasure, pain, or fear and all the sinful appetites of the human mind.
Image of the beast
What a pitiful sight is malice, finding pleasure in revenge! Evil is sometimes a man’s highest conception of right, until his grasp on good 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 which rushes forth to clamor with midnight and tempest.
Peremptory demands
To the physical senses, the strict demands of Christian Science seem peremptory; but mortals are hastening to learn that Life is God, good, and that evil has in reality neither place nor power in the human or the divine economy.
Moral courage
Fear of punishment never made man truly honest. Moral courage is requisite to meet the wrong and to proclaim the right. But how shall we reform the man who has more animal than moral courage, and who has not the true idea of good? Through human consciousness, convince the mortal of his mistake in seeking material means for gaining happiness. Reason is the most active human faculty. Let that inform the sentiments and awaken the man’s 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 spiritual sense, which silences the material or corporeal. Then he not only will be saved, but is saved.
Final destruction of error
Mortals suppose that they can live without goodness, when God is good and the only real Life. What is the result? Understanding little about the divine Principle which saves and heals, mortals get rid of sin, sickness, and death only in belief. 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 His allness.
Promise perpetual
This understanding of man’s power, when he is equipped by God, has sadly disappeared from Christian history. For centuries it has been dormant, a lost element of Christianity. Our missionaries carry the Bible to India, but can it be said that they explain it practically, as Jesus did, when hundreds of persons die there annually from serpent-bites? Understanding spiritual law and knowing that there is no material law, Jesus said: “These signs shall follow them that believe, . . . they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them. They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” It were well had Christendom believed and obeyed this sacred saying.
Jesus’ promise is perpetual. Had it been given only to his immediate disciples, the Scriptural passage would read you, not they. The purpose of his great life-work extends through time and includes universal humanity. Its Principle is infinite, reaching beyond the pale of a single period or of a limited following. As time moves on, the healing elements of pure Christianity will be fairly dealt with; they will be sought and taught, and will glow in all the grandeur of universal goodness.
Imitation of Jesus
A little leaven leavens the whole lump. A little understanding of Christian Science proves the truth of all that I say of it. Because you cannot walk on the water and raise the dead, you have no right to question the great might of divine Science in these directions. Be thankful that Jesus, who was the true demonstrator of Science, did these things, and left his example for us. In Science we can use only what we understand. We must prove our faith by demonstration.
One should not tarry in the storm if the body is freezing, nor should he remain in the devouring flames. Until one is able to prevent bad results, he should avoid their occasion. To be discouraged, is to resemble a pupil in addition, who attempts to solve a problem of Euclid, and denies the rule of the problem because he fails in his first effort.
Error destroyed, not pardoned
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 divine Principle never repents, but maintains the claim of Truth by quenching error. The pardon of divine mercy is the destruction of error. If men understood their real spiritual source to be all blessedness, they would struggle for recourse to the spiritual and be at peace; but the deeper the error into which mortal mind is plunged, the more intense the opposition to spirituality, till error yields to Truth.
The hopeful outlook
Human resistance to divine Science weakens in proportion as mortals give up error for Truth and the understanding of being supersedes mere belief. Until the author of this book learned the vastness of Christian Science, the fixedness of mortal illusions, and the human hatred of Truth, she cherished sanguine hopes that Christian Science would meet with immiediate and universal acceptance.
When the following platform is understood and the letter and the spirit bear witness, the infallibility of divine metaphysics will be demonstrated.
The deific supremacy
- God is infinite, the only Life, substance, Spirit, or Soul, the only intelligence of the universe, including man. Eye hath neither seen God nor His image and likeness. Neither God nor the perfect man can be discerned by the material senses. The individuality of Spirit, or the infinite, is unknown, and thus a knowledge of it is left either to human conjecture or to the revelation of divine Science.
The deific definitions
- God is what the Scriptures declare Him to be, Life, Truth, Love. Spirit is divine Principle, and divine Principle is Love, and Love is Mind, and Mind is not both good and bad, for God is Mind; therefore there is in reality one Mind only, because there is one God.
Evil obsolete
III. The notion that both evil and good are real is a delusion of material sense, which Science annihilates. Evil is nothing, no thing, mind, nor power. As manifested by mankind it stands for a lie, nothing claiming to be something,–for lust, dishonesty, selfishness, envy, hypocrisy, slander, hate, theft, adultery, murder, dementia, insanity, inanity, devil, hell, with all the etceteras that word includes.
Life the creator
- God is divine Life, and Life is no more confined to the forms which reflect it than substance is in its shadow. If life were in mortal man or material things, it would be subject to their limitations and would end in death. Life is Mind, 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 sense, which falsely testifies to a beginning and an end.
Allness of Spirit
- The Scriptures imply that God is All-in-all. From this it follows that nothing possesses reality nor existence except the divine Mind and His ideas. The Scriptures also declare that God is Spirit. Therefore in Spirit all is harmony, and there can be no discord; all is Life, and there is no death. Everything in God’s universe expresses Him.
The universal cause
- God is individual, incorporeal. He is divine Principle, Love, the universal cause, the only creator, and there is no other self-existence. He is allinclusive, and is reflected by all that is real and eternal and by nothing else. He fills all space, and it is impossible to conceive of such omnipresence and individuality except as infinite Spirit or Mind. Hence all is Spirit and spiritual.
Divine trinity
VII. Life, Truth, and Love constitute the triune Person called God,–that is, the triply divine Principle, Love. They represent a trinity in unity, three in one, – the same in essence, though multiform in office: God the Father-Mother; Christ the spiritual idea of sonship; divine Science or the Holy Comforter. These three express in divine Science the threefold, essential nature of the infinite. They also indicate the divine Principle of scientific being, the intelligent relation of God to man and the universe.
Father-Mother
VIII. Father-Mother is the name for Deity, which indicates His tender relationship to His spiritual creation. As the apostle expressed it in words which he quoted with approbation from a classic poet: “For we are also His offspring.”
The Son of God
- Jesus was born of Mary. Christ is the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness. The Christ is incorporeal, spiritual,–yea, the divine image and likeness, dispelling the illusions of the senses; the Way, the Truth, and the Life, healing the sick and casting out evils, destroying sin, disease, and death. As Paul says: “There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” The corporeal man Jesus was human.
Holy Ghost or Comforter
- Jesus demonstrated Christ; he proved that Christ is the divine idea of God–the Holy Ghost, or Comforter, revealing the divine Principle, Love, and leading into all truth.
Christ Jesus
- Jesus was the son of a virgin. He was appointed to speak God’s word and to appear to mortals in such a form of humanity as they could understand as well as perceive. Mary’s conception of him was spiritual, for only purity could reflect Truth and Love, which were plainly incarnate in the good and pure Christ Jesus. He expressed the highest type of divinity, which a fleshly form could express in that age. Into the real and ideal man the fleshly element cannot enter. Thus it is that Christ illustrates the coincidence, or spiritual agreement, between God and man in His image.
Messiah or Christ
XII. The word Christ is not properly a synonym for Jesus, though it is commonly so used. Jesus was a human name, which belonged to him in common with other Hebrew boys and men, for it is identical with the name Joshua, the renowned Hebrew leader. On the other hand, Christ is not a name so much as the divine title of Jesus. Christ expresses God’s spiritual, eternal nature. The name is synonymous with Messiah, and alludes to the spirituality which is taught, illustrated, and demonstrated in the life of which Christ Jesus was the embodiment. The proper name of our Master in the Greek was Jesus the Christ; but Christ Jesus better signifies the Godlike.
The divine Principle and idea
XIII. The advent of Jesus of Nazareth marked the first century of the Christian era, but the Christ is without beginning of years or end of days. Throughout all generations both before and after the Christian era, the Christ, as the spiritual idea,–the reflection of God,–has come with some measure of power and grace to all prepared to receive Christ, Truth. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and the prophets caught glorious glimpses of the Messiah, or Christ, which baptized these seers in the divine nature, the essence of Love. The divine image, idea, or Christ was, is, and ever will be inseparable from the divine Principle, God. Jesus referred to this unity of his spiritual identity thus: “Before Abraham was, I am;” “I and my Father are one;” “My Father is greater than I.” The one Spirit includes all identities.
Spiritual oneness
XIV. By these sayings Jesus meant, not that the human Jesus was or is eternal, but that the divine idea or Christ was and is so and therefore antedated Abraham; not that the corporeal Jesus was one with the Father, but that the spiritual idea, Christ, dwells forever in the bosom of the Father, God, from which it illumines heaven and earth; not that the Father is greater than Spirit, which is God, but greater, infinitely greater, than the fleshly Jesus, whose earthly career was brief.
The Son’s duality
- The invisible Christ was imperceptible to the so-called personal senses, whereas Jesus appeared as a bodily existence. This dual personality of the unseen and the seen, the spiritual and material, the eternal Christ and the corporeal Jesus manifest in flesh, continued until the Master’s ascension, when the human, material concept, or Jesus, disappeared, while the spiritual self, or Christ, continues to exist in the eternal order of divine Science, taking away the sins of the world, as the Christ has always done, even before the human Jesus was incarnate to mortal eyes.
Eternity of the Christ
XVI. This was “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” – slain, that is, according to the testimony of the corporeal senses, but undying in the deific Mind. The Revelator represents the Son of man as saying (Revelation i. 17, 18): “I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead [not understood]; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, [Science has explained me].” This is a mystical statement of the eternity of the Christ, and is also a reference to the human sense of Jesus crucified.
Infinite Spirit
XVII. Spirit being God, there is but one Spirit, for there can be but one infinite and therefore one God.
There are neither spirits many nor gods many. There is no evil in Spirit, because God is Spirit. The theory, that Spirit is distinct from matter but must pass through it, or into it, to be individualized, would reduce God to dependency on matter, and establish a basis for pantheism.
The only substance
XVIII. Spirit, God, has created all in and of Himself. Spirit never created matter. There is nothing in Spirit out of which matter could be made, for, as the Bible declares, without the Logos, the AEon or Word of God, “was not anything made that was made.” Spirit is the only substance, the invisible and indivisible infinite God. Things spiritual and eternal are substantial. Things material and temporal are insubstantial.
Soul and Spirit one
XIX. Soul and Spirit being one, God and Soul are one, and this one never included in a limited mind or a limited body. Spirit is eternal, divine. Nothing but Spirit, Soul, can evolve Life, for Spirit is more than all else. Because Soul is immortal, it does not exist in mortality. Soul must be incorporeal to be Spirit, for Spirit is not finite. Only by losing the false sense of Soul can we gain the eternal unfolding of Life as immortality brought to light.
The one divine Mind
- Mind is the divine Principle, Love, and can produce nothing unlike the eternal Father-Mother, God. Reality is spiritual, harmonious, immutable, immortal, divine, eternal. Nothing unspiritual can be real, harmonious, or eternal. Sin, sickness, and mortality are the suppositional antipodes of Spirit, and must be contradictions of reality.
The divine Ego
XXI. The Ego is deathless and limitless, for limits would imply and impose ignorance. Mind is the I AM, or infinity. Mind never enters the finite. Intelligence never passes into non-intelligence, or matter. Good never enters into evil the unlimited into the limited, the eternal into the temporal, nor the immortal into mortality. The divine Ego, or individuality, is reflected in all spiritual individuality from the infinitesimal to the infinite.
The real manhood
XXII. Immortal man was and is God’s image or idea, even the infinite expression of infinite Mind, and immortal man is coexistent and coeternal with that Mind. He has been forever in the eternal Mind, God; but infinite Mind can never be in man, but is reflected by man. The spiritual man’s consciousness and individuality are reflections of God. They are the emanations of Him who is Life, Truth, and Love. Immortal man is not and never was material, but always spiritual and eternal.
Indivisibility of the infinite
XXIII. God is indivisible. A portion of God could not enter man; neither could God’s fulness be reflected by a single man, else God would be manifestly finite, lose the deific character, and become less than God. Allness is the measure of the infinite, and nothing less can express God.
God the parent Mind
XXIV. God, the divine Principle of man, and man in God’s likeness are inseparable, harmonious, and eternal. The Science of being furnishes the rule of perfection, and brings immortality to light. God and man are not the same, but in the order of divine Science, God and man coexist and are eternal. God is the parent Mind, and man is God’s spiritual offspring.
Man reflects the perfect God
XXV. God is individual and personal in a scientific sense, but not in any anthropomorphic sense. Therefore man, reflecting God, cannot lose his individuality; but as material sensation, or a soul in the body, blind mortals do lose sight of spiritual individuality. Material personality is not realism; it is not the reflection or likeness of Spirit, the perfect God. Sensualism is not bliss, but bondage. For true happiness, man must harmonize with his Principle, divine Love; the Son must be in accord with the Father, in conformity with Christ. According to divine Science, man is in a degree as perfect as the Mind that forms him. The truth of being makes man harmonious and immortal, while error is mortal and discordant.
Purity the path to perfection
XXVI. Christian Science demonstrates that none but the pure in heart can see God, as the gospel teaches. In proportion to his purity is man perfect; and perfection is the order of celestial being which demonstrates Life in Christ, Life’s spiritual ideal.
True idea of man
XXVII. The true idea of man, as the reflection of the invisible God, is as incomprehensible to the limited senses as is man’s infinite Principle. The visible universe and material man are the poor counterfeits of the invisible universe and spiritual man. Eternal things (verities) are God’s thoughts as they exist in the spiritual realm of the real. Temporal things are the thoughts of mortals and are the unreal, being the opposite of the real or the spiritual and eternal.
Truth demonstrated
XXVIII. Subject sickness, sin, and death to the rule of health and holiness in Christian Science, and you ascertain that this Science is demonstrably true, for it heals the sick and sinning as no other system can. Christian Science, rightly understood, leads to eternal harmony. It brings to light the only living and true God and man as made in His likeness; whereas the opposite belief–that man originates in matter and has beginning and end, that he is both soul and body, both good and evil, both spiritual and material–terminates in discord and mortality, in the error which must be destroyed by Truth. The mortality of material man proves that error has been ingrafted into the premises and conclusions of material and mortal humanity.
Adam not ideal man
XXIX. The word Adam is from the Hebrew adamah, signifying the red color of the ground, dust, nothingness. Divide the name Adam into two syllables, and it reads, a dam, or obstruction. This suggests the thought of something fluid, of mortal mind in solution. It further suggests the thought of that “darkness . . . upon the face of the deep,” when matter or dust was deemed the agent of Deity in creating man,–when matter, as that which is accursed, stood opposed to Spirit. Here a dam is not a mere play upon words; it stands for obstruction, error, even the supposed separation of man from God, and the obstacle which the serpent, sin, would impose between man and his creator. The dissection and definition of words, aside from their metaphysical derivation, is not scientific. Jehovah declared the ground was accursed; and from this ground, or matter, sprang Adam, notwithstanding God had blessed the earth “for man’s sake.” From this it follows that Adam was not the ideal man for whom the earth was blessed. The ideal man was revealed in due time, and was known as Christ Jesus.
Divine pardon
XXX. The destruction of sin is the divine method of pardon. Divine Life destroys death, Truth destroys error, and Love destroys hate. Being destroyed, sin needs no other form of forgiveness. Does not God’s pardon, destroying any one sin, prophesy and involve the final destruction of all sin?
Evil not produced by God
XXXI. Since God is All, there is no room for His unlikeness. God, Spirit, alone created all, and called it good. Therefore evil, being contrary to good, is unreal, and cannot be the product of God. A sinner can receive no encouragement from the fact that Science demonstrates the unreality of evil, for the sinner would make a reality of sin,–would make that real which is unreal, and thus heap up “wrath against the day of wrath.” He is joining in a conspiracy against himself, – against his own awakening to the awful unreality by which he has been deceived. Only those, who repent of sin and forsake the unreal, can fully understand the unreality of evil.
Basis of health and immortality
XXXII. As the mythology of pagan Rome has yielded to a more spiritual idea of Deity, so will our material theories yield to spiritual ideas, until the finite gives place to the infinite, sickness to health, sin to holiness, and God’s kingdom comes “in earth, as it is in heaven.” The basis of all health, sinlessness, and immortality is the great fact that God is the only Mind; and this Mind must be not merely believed, but it must be understood. To get rid of sin through Science, is to divest sin of any supposed mind or reality, and never to admit that sin can have intelligence or power, pain or pleasure. You conquer error by denying its verity. Our various theories will never lose their imaginary power for good or evil, until we lose our faith in them and make life its own proof of harmony and God.
This text in the book of Ecclesiastes conveys the Christian Science thought, especially when the word duty, which is not in the original, is omitted: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” In other words: Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: love God and keep His commandments: for this is the whole of man in His image and likeness. Divine Love is infinite. Therefore all that really exists is in and of God, and manifests His love.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” (Exodus xx. 3.) The First Commandment is my favorite text. It demonstrates Christian Science. It inculcates the triunity of God, Spirit, Mind; it signifies that man shall have no other spirit or mind but God, eternal good, and that all men shall have one Mind. The divine Principle of the First Commandment bases the Science of being, by which man demonstrates health, holiness, and life eternal. One infinite God, good, unifies men and nations; constitutes the brotherhood of man; ends wars; fulfils the Scripture, “Love thy neighbor as thyself;” annihilates pagan and Christian idolatry,–whatever is wrong in social, civil, criminal, political, and religious codes; equalizes the sexes; annuls the curse on man, and leaves nothing that can sin, suffer, be punished or destroyed.
Chapter XI – Some Objections Answered
And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not. Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?–JESUS.
But if the spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His spirit that dwelleth in you.–PAUL.
THE strictures on this volume would condemn to oblivion the truth, which is raising up thousands from helplessness to strength and elevating them from a theoretical to a practical Christianity. These criticisms are generally based on detached sentences or clauses separated from their context. Even the Scriptures, which grow in beauty and consistency from one grand root, appear contradictory when subjected to such usage. Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” [Truth].
Supported by facts
In Christian Science mere opinion is valueless. Proof is essential to a due estimate of this subject. Sneers at the application of the word Science to Christianity cannot prevent that from being scientific which is based on divine Principle, demonstrated according to a divine given rule, and subjected to proof. The facts are so absolute and numerous in support of Christian Science, that misrepresentation and denunciation cannot overthrow it. Paul alludes to “doubtful disputations.” The hour has struck when proof and demonstration, instead of opinion and dogma, are summoned to the support of Christianity, “making wise the simple.”
Commands of Jesus
In the result of some unqualified condemnations of scientific Mind-healing, one may see with sorrow the sad effects on the sick of denying Truth. He that decries this Science does it presumptuously, in the face of Bible history and in defiance of the direct command of Jesus, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel,” to which command was added the promise that his students should cast out evils and heal the sick. He bade the seventy disciples, as well as the twelve, heal the sick in any town where they should be hospitably received.
Christianity scientific
If Christianity is not scientific, and Science is not of God, then there is no invariable law, and truth becomes an accident. Shall it be denied that a system which works according to the Scriptures has Scriptural authority?
Argument of good works
Christian Science awakens the sinner, reclaims the infidel, and raises from the couch of pain the helpless invalid. It speaks to the dumb the words of Truth, and they answer with rejoicing. It causes the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, and the blind to see. Who would be the first to disown the Christliness of good works, when our Master says, “By their fruits ye shall know them”?
If Christian Scientists were teaching or practising pharmacy or obstetrics according to the common theories, no denunciations would follow them, even if their treatment resulted in the death of a patient. The people are taught in such cases to say, Amen. Shall I then be smitten for healing and for teaching Truth as the Principle of healing, and for proving my word by my deed? James said: “Show me thy faith without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works.”
Personal experience
Is not finite mind ignorant of God’s method? This makes it doubly unfair to impugn and misrepresent the facts, although, without this cross-bearing, one might not be able to say with the apostle, “None of these things move me.” The sick, the halt, and the blind look up to Christian Science with blessings, and Truth will not be forever hidden by unjust parody from the quickened sense of the people.
Proof from miracles
Jesus strips all disguise from error, when his teachings are fully understood. By parable and argument he explains the impossibility of good producing evil; and he also scientifically demonstrates this great fact, proving by what are wrongly called miracles, that sin, sickness, and death are beliefs – illusive errors which he could and did destroy.
It would sometimes seem as if truth were rejected because meekness and spirituality are the conditions of its acceptance, while Christendom generally demands so much less.
Example of the disciples
Anciently those apostles who were Jesus’ students, as well as Paul who was not one of his students, healed the sick and reformed the sinner by their religion. Hence the mistake which allows words, rather than works, to follow such examples! Whoever is the first meekly and conscientiously to press along the line of gospel-healing, is often accounted a heretic.
Strong position
It is objected to Christian Science that it claims God as the only absolute Life and Soul, and man to be His idea,–that is, His image. It should be added that this is claimed to represent the normal, healthful, and sinless condition of man in divine Science, and that this claim is made because the Scriptures say that God has created man in His own image and after His likeness. Is it sacrilegious to assume that God’s likeness is not found in matter, sin, sickness, and death?
Efficacy may be attested
Were it more fully understood that Truth heals and that error causes disease, the opponents of a demonstrable Science would perhaps mercifully withhold their misrepresentations, which harm the sick; and until the enemies of Christian Science test its efficacy according to the rules which disclose its merits or demerits, it would be just to observe the Scriptural precept, “Judge not.”
The one divine method
There are various methods of treating disease, which are not included in the commonly accepted systems; but there is only one which should be presented to the whole world, and that is the Christian Science which Jesus preached and practised and left to us as his rich legacy.
Why should one refuse to investigate this method of treating disease? Why support the popular systems of medicine, when the physician may perchance be an infidel and may lose ninety-and-nine patients, while Christian Science cures its hundred? Is it because allopathy and homoeopathy are more fashionable and less spiritual?
Omnipotence set forth
In the Bible the word Spirit is so commonly applied to Deity, that Spirit and God are often regarded as synonymous terms; and it is thus they are uniformly used and understood in Christian Science. As it is evident that the likeness of Spirit cannot be material, does it not follow that God cannot be in His unlikeness and work through drugs to heal the sick? When the omnipotence of God is preached and His absoluteness is set forth, Christian sermons will heal the sick.
Contradictions not found
It is sometimes said, in criticising Christian Science, that the mind which contradicts itself neither knows itself nor what it is saying. It is indeed no small matter to know one’s self; but in this volume of mine there are no contradictory statements,–at least none which are apparent to those who understand its propositions well enough to pass judgment upon them. One who understands Christian Science can heal the sick on the divine Principle of Christian Science, and this practical proof is the only feasible evidence that one does understand this Science.
Anybody, who is able to perceive the incongruity between God’s idea and poor humanity, ought to be able to discern the distinction (made by Christian Science) between God’s man, made in His image, and the sinning race of Adam.
The apostle says: “For if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself.” This thought of human, material nothingness, which Science inculcates, enrages the carnal mind and is the main cause of the carnal mind’s antagonism.
God’s idea the ideal man
It is not the purpose of Christian Science to “educate the idea of God, or treat it for disease,” as is alleged by one critic. I regret that such criticism confounds man with Adam. When man is spoken of as made in God’s image, it is not sinful and sickly mortal man who is referred to, but the ideal man, reflecting God’s likeness.
Nothingness of error
It is sometimes said that Christian Science teaches the nothingness of sin, sickness, and death, and then teaches how this nothingness is to be saved and healed. The nothingness of nothing is plain; but we need to understand that error is nothing, and that its nothingness is not saved, but must be demonstrated in order to prove the somethingness – yea, the allness of Truth. It is self-evident that we are harmonious only as we cease to manifest evil or the belief that we suffer from the sins of others. Disbelief in error destroys error, and leads to the discernment of Truth. There are no vacuums. How then can this demonstration be “fraught with falsities painful to behold”?
Truth antidotes error
We treat error through the understanding of Truth, because Truth is error’s antidote. If a dream ceases, it is self-destroyed, and the terror is over. When a sufferer is convinced that there is no reality in his belief of pain,–because matter has no sensation, hence pain in matter is a false belief,–how can he suffer longer? Do you feel the pain of tooth-pulling, when you believe that nitrous-oxide gas has made you unconscious? Yet, in your concept, the tooth, the operation, and the forceps are unchanged.
Serving two masters
Material beliefs must be expelled to make room for spiritual understanding. We cannot serve both God and mammon at the same time; but is not this what frail mortals are trying to do? Paul says:
“The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” Who is ready to admit this?
It is said by one critic, that to verify this wonderful philosophy Christian Science declares that whatever is mortal or discordant has no origin, existence, nor realness. Nothing really has Life but God, who is infinite Life; hence all is Life, and death has no dominion. This writer infers that if anything needs to be doctored, it must be the one God, or Mind. Had he stated his syllogism correctly, the conclusion would be that there is nothing left to be doctored.
Essential element of Christianity
Critics should consider that the so-called mortal man is not the reality of man. Then they would behold the signs of Christ’s coming. Christ, as the spiritual or true idea of God, comes now as of old, preaching the gospel to the poor, healing the sick, and casting out evils. Is it error which is restoring an essential element of Christianity, namely, apostolic, divine healing? No; it is the Science of Christianity which is restoring it, and is the light shining in darkness, which the darkness comprehends not.
If Christian Science takes away the popular gods, sin, sickness, and death, – it is Christ, Truth, who destroys these evils, and so proves their nothingness.
The dream that matter and error are something must yield to reason and revelation. Then mortals will behold the nothingness of sickness and sin, and sin and sickness will disappear from consciousness. The harmonious will appear real, and the inharmonious unreal. These critics will then see that error is indeed the nothingness, which they chide us for naming nothing and which we desire neither to honor nor to fear.
Medical theories virtually admit the nothingness of hallucinations, even while treating them as disease; and who objects to this? Ought we not, then, to approve any cure, which is effected by making the disease appear to be–what it really is–an illusion?
All disease a delusion
Here is the difficulty: it is not generally understood how one disease can be just as much a delusion as another. It is a pity that the medical faculty and clergy have not learned this, for Jesus established this foundational fact, when devils, delusions, were cast out and the dumb spake.
Elimination of sickness
Are we irreverent towards sin, or imputing too much power to God, when we ascribe to Him almighty Life and Love? I deny His cooperation with evil, because I desire to have no faith in evil or in any power but God, good. Is it not well to eliminate from so-called mortal mind that which, so long as it remains in mortal mind, will show itself in forms of sin, sickness, and death? Instead of tenaciously defending the supposed rights of disease, while complaining of the suffering, disease brings, would it not be well to abandon the defence, especially when by so doing our own condition can be improved and that of other persons as well?
Full fruitage yet to come
I have never supposed the world would immediately witness the full fruitage of Christian Science, or that sin, disease, and death would not be believed for an indefinite time; but this I do aver, that, as a result of teaching Christian Science, ethics and temperance have received all impulse, health has been restored, and longevity increased. If such are the present fruits, what will the harvest be, when this Science is more generally understood?
Law and gospel
As Paul asked of the unfaithful in ancient days, so the rabbis of the present day ask concerning our healing and teaching, “Through breaking the law, dishonorest thou God?” We have the gospel, however, and our Master annulled material law by healing contrary to it. We propose to follow the Master’s example. We should subordinate material law to spiritual law. Two essential points of Christian Science are, that neither Life nor man dies, and that God is not the author of sickness.
Language inadequate
The chief difficulty in conveying the teachings of divine Science accurately to human thought lies in this, that like all other languages, English is inadequate to the expression of spiritual conceptions and propositions, because one is obliged to use material terms in dealing with spiritual ideas. The elucidation of Christian Science lies in its spiritual sense, and this sense must be gained by its disciples in order to grasp the meaning of this Science. Out of this condition grew the prophecy concerning the Christian apostles, “They shall speak with new tongues.”
Speaking of the things of Spirit while dwelling on a material plane, material terms must be generally employed. Mortal thought does not at once catch the higher meaning, and can do so only as thought is educated up to spiritual apprehension. To a certain extent this is equally true of all learning, even that which is wholly material.
Substance spiritual
In Christian Science, substance is understood to be Spirit, while the opponents of Christian Science believe substance to be matter. They think of matter as something and almost the only thing, and of the things which pertain to Spirit as next to nothing, or as very far removed from daily experience. Christian Science takes exactly the opposite view.
Both words and works
To understand all our Master’s sayings as recorded in the New Testament, sayings infinitely important, his followers must grow into that stature of manhood in Christ Jesus which enables them to interpret his spiritual meaning. Then they know how Truth casts out error and heals the sick. His words were the offspring of his deeds, both of which must be understood. Unless the works are comprehended which his words explained, the words are blind.
The Master often refused to explain his words, because it was difficult in a material age to apprehend spiritual Truth. He said: “This people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.”
The divine life-link
“The Word was made flesh.” Divine Truth must be known by its effects on the body as well as on the mind, before the Science of being can be demonstrated. Hence its embodiment in the incarnate Jesus,–that life-link forming the connection through which the real reaches the unreal, Soul rebukes sense, and Truth destroys error.
Truth a present help
In Jewish worship the Word was materially explained, and the spiritual sense was scarcely perceived. The religion which sprang from half-hidden Israelitish history was pedantic and void of healing power. When we lose faith in God’s power to heal, we distrust the divine Principle which demonstrates Christian Science, and then we cannot heal the sick. Neither can we heal through the help of Spirit, if we plant ourselves on a material basis.
The author became a member of the orthodox Congregational Church in early years. Later she learned that her own prayers failed to heal her as did the prayers of her devout parents and the church; but when the spiritual sense of the creed was discerned in the Science of Christianity, this spiritual sense was a present help. It was the living, palpitating presence of Christ, Truth, which healed the sick.
Fatal premises
We cannot bring out the practical proof of Christianity, which Jesus required, while error seems as potent and real to us as Truth, and while we make a personal devil and an anthropomorphic God our starting-points,–especially if we consider Satan as a being coequal in power with Deity, if not superior to Him. Because such starting-points are neither spiritual nor scientific, they cannot work out the Spirit-rule of Christian healing, which proves the nothingness of error, discord, by demonstrating the all-inclusiveness of harmonious Truth.
Fruitless worship
The Israelites centred their thoughts on the material in their attempted worship of the spiritual. To them matter was substance, and Spirit was shadow. They thought to worship Spirit from a material standpoint, but this was impossible. They might appeal to Jehovah, but their prayer brought down no proof that it was heard, because they did not sufficiently understand God to be able to demonstrate His power to heal,–to make harmony the reality and discord the unreality.
Spirit the tangible
Our Master declared that his material body was not spirit, evidently considering it a mortal and material belief of flesh and bones, whereas the Jews took a diametrically opposite view. To Jesus, not materiality, but spirituality, was the reality of man’s existence, while to the rabbis the spiritual was the intangible and uncertain, if not the unreal.
Ghosts not realities
Would a mother say to her child, who is frightened at imaginary ghosts and sick in consequence of the fear: “I know that ghosts are real. They exist, and are to be feared; but you must not be afraid of them”?
Children, like adults, ought to fear a reality which can harm them and which they do not understand, for at any moment they may become its helpless victims; but instead of increasing children’s fears by declaring ghosts to be real, merciless, and powerful, thus watering the very roots of childish timidity, children should be assured that their fears are groundless, that ghosts are not realities, but traditional beliefs, erroneous and man-made.
In short, children should be told not to believe in ghosts, because there are no such things. If belief in their reality is destroyed, terror of ghosts will depart and health be restored. The objects of alarm will then vanish into nothingness, no longer seeming worthy of fear or honor. To accomplish a good result, it is certainly not irrational to tell the truth about ghosts.
The real and the unreal
The Christianly scientific real is the sensuous unreal. Sin, disease, whatever seems real to material sense, is unreal in divine Science. The physical senses and Science have ever been antagonistic, and they will so continue, till the testimony of the physical senses yields entirely to Christian Science. How can a Christian, having the stronger evidence of Truth which contradicts the evidence of error, think of the latter as real or true, either in the form of sickness or of sin? All must admit that Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and that omnipotent Truth certainly does destroy error.
Superstition obsolete
The age has not wholly outlived the sense of ghostly beliefs. It still holds them more or less. Time has not yet reached eternity, immortality, complete reality. All the real is eternal. Perfection underlies reality. Without perfection, nothing is wholly real. All things will continue to disappear, until per- fection appears and reality is reached. We must give up the spectral at all points. We must not continue to admit the somethingness of superstition, but we must yield up all belief in it and be wise. When we learn that error is not real, we shall be ready for progress, “forgetting those things which are behind.”
The grave does not banish the ghost of materiality. So long as there are supposed limits to Mind, and those limits are human, so long will ghosts seem to continue. Mind is limitless. It never was material. The true idea of being is spiritual and immortal, and from this it follows that whatever is laid off is the ghost, some unreal belief. Mortal beliefs can neither demonstrate Christianity nor apprehend the reality of Life.
Christian warfare
Are the protests of Christian Science against the notion that there can be material life, substance, or mind “utter falsities and absurdities,” as some aver? Why then do Christians try to obey the Scriptures and war against “the world, the flesh, and the devil”? Why do they invoke the divine aid to enable them to leave all for Christ, Truth? Why do they use this phraseology, and yet deny Christian Science, when it teaches precisely this thought? The words of divine Science find their immortality in deeds, for their Principle heals the sick and spiritualizes humanity.
Healing omitted
On the other hand, the Christian opponents of Christian Science neither give nor offer any proofs that their Master’s religion can heal the sick. Surely it is not enough to cleave to barren and desultory dogmas, derived from the traditions of the elders who thereunto have set their seals.
Scientific consistency
Consistency is seen in example more than in precept. Inconsistency is shown by words without deeds, which are like clouds without rain. If our words fail to express our deeds, God will redeem that weakness, and out of the mouth of babes He will perfect praise. The night of materiality is far spent, and with the dawn Truth will waken men spiritually to hear and to speak the new tongue.
Sin should become unreal to every one. It is in itself inconsistent, a divided kingdom. Its supposed realism has no divine authority, and I rejoice in the apprehension of this grand verity.
Spiritual meaning
The opponents of divine Science must be charitable, if they would be Christian. If the letter of Christian Science appears inconsistent, they should gain the spiritual meaning of Christian Science, and then the ambiguity will vanish.
Practical arguments
The charge of inconsistency in Christianly scientific methods of dealing with sin and disease is met by something practical,–namely, the proof of the utility of these methods; and proofs are better than mere verbal arguments or prayers which evince no spiritual power to heal.
As for sin and disease, Christian Science says, in the language of the Master, “Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.” Let discord of every name and nature be heard no more, and let the harmonious and true sense of Life and being take possession of human consciousness.
What is the relative value of the two conflicting theories regarding Christian healing? One, according to the commands of our Master, heals the sick. The other, popular religion, declines to admit that Christ’s religion has exercised any systematic healing power since the first century.
Conditions of criticism
The statement that the teachings of Christian Science in this work are “absolutely false, and the most egregious fallacies ever offered for acceptance,” is an opinion wholly due to a misapprehension both of the divine Principle and practice of Christian Science and to a consequent inability to demonstrate this Science. Without this understanding, no one is capable of impartial or correct criticism, because demonstration and spiritual understanding are God’s immortal keynotes, proved to be such by our Master and evidenced by the sick who are cured and by the sinners who are reformed.
Weakness of material theories
Strangely enough, we ask for material theories in support of spiritual and eternal truths, when the two are so antagonistic that the material thought must become spiritualized before the spiritual fact is attained. So-called material existence affords no evidence theories of spiritual existence and immortality. Sin, sickness, and death do not prove man’s entity or immortality. Discord can never establish the facts of harmony. Matter is not the vestibule of Spirit.
Irreconciliable differences
Jesus reasoned on this subject practically, and controlled sickness, sin, and death on the basis of his spirituality. Understanding the nothingness of material things, he spoke of flesh and Spirit as the two opposites, – as error and Truth, not contributing in any way to each other’s happiness and existence. Jesus knew, “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.”
Copartnership impossible
There is neither a present nor an eternal copartnership between error and Truth, between flesh and Spirit. God is as incapable of producing sin, sickness, and death as He is of experiencing these errors. How then is it possible for Him to create man subject to this triad of errors,–man who is made in the divine likeness?
Does God create a material man out of Himself, Spirit? Does evil proceed from good? Does divine Love commit a fraud on humanity by making man inclined to sin, and then punishing him for it? Would any one call it wise and good to create the primitive, and then punish its derivative?
Two infinite creators absurd
Does subsequent follow its antecedent? It does. Was there original self-creative sin? Then there must have been more than one creator, more than one God.
In common justice, we must admit that God will not punish man for doing what He created man capable of doing, and knew from the outset that man would do. God is “of purer eyes than to behold evil.” We sustain Truth, not by accepting, but by rejecting a lie. Jesus said of personified evil, that it was “a liar, and the father of it.” Truth creates neither a lie, a capacity to lie, nor a liar. If mankind would relinquish the belief that God makes sickness, sin, and death, or makes man capable of suffering on account of this malevolent triad, the foundations of error would be sapped and error’s destruction ensured; but if we theoretically endow mortals with the creativeness and authority of Deity, how dare we attempt to destroy what He hath made, or even to deny that God made man evil and made evil good?
Anthropomorphism
History teaches that the popular and false notions about the Divine Being and character have originated in the human mind. As there is in reality but one God, one Mind, wrong notions about God must have originated in a false supposition, not in immortal Truth, and they are fading out. They are false claims, which will eventually disappear, according to the vision of St. John in the Apocalypse.
One supremacy
If what opposes God is real, there must be two powers, and God is not supreme and infinite. Can Deity be almighty, if another mighty and self-creative cause exists and sways mankind? Has the Father “Life in Himself,” as the Scriptures say, and, if so, can Life, or God, dwell in evil and create it? Can matter drive Life, Spirit, hence, and so defeat omnipotence?
Matter impotent
Is the woodman’s axe, which destroys a tree’s so-called life, superior to omnipotence? Can a leaden bullet deprive a man of Life,–that is, of God, who is man’s Life? If God is at the mercy of matter, then matter is omnipotent. Such doctrines are “confusion worse confounded.” If two statements directly contradict each other and one is true, the other must be false. Is Science thus contradictory?
Scientific and Biblical facts
Christian Science, understood, coincides with the Scriptures, and sustains logically and demonstratively every point it presents. Otherwise it would not be Science, and could not present its proofs. Christian Science is neither made up of contradictory aphorisms nor of the inventions of those who scoff at God. It presents the calm and clear verdict of Truth against error, uttered and illustrated by the prophets, by Jesus, by his apostles, as is recorded throughout the Scriptures.
Why are the words of Jesus more frequently cited for our instruction than are his remarkable works? Is it not because there are few who have gained a true knowledge of the great import to Christianity of those works?
Personal confidence
Sometimes it is said; “Rest assured that whatever effect Christian Scientists may have on the sick, comes through rousing within the sick a belief that in the removal of disease these healers have wonderful power, derived from the Holy Ghost.” Is it likely that church-members have more faith in some Christian Scientist, whom they have perhaps never seen and against whom they have been warned, than they have in their own accredited and orthodox pastors, whom they have seen and have been taught to love and to trust?
Let any clergyman try to cure his friends by their faith in him. Will that faith heal them? Yet Scientists will take the same cases, and cures will follow. Is this because the patients have more faith in the Scientist than in their pastor? I have healed infidels whose only objection to this method was, that I as a Christian Scientist believed in the Holy Spirit, while they, the patients, did not.
Even though you aver that the material senses are indispensable to man’s existence or entity, you must change the human concept of life, and must at length know yourself spiritually and scientifically. The evidence of the existence of Spirit, Soul, is palpable only to spiritual sense, and is not apparent to the material senses, which cognize only that which is the opposite of Spirit.
True Christianity is to be honored wherever found, but when shall we arrive at the goal which that word implies? From Puritan parents, the discoverer of Christian Science early received her religious education. In childhood, she often listened with joy to these words, falling from the lips of her saintly mother, “God is able to raise you up from sickness;” and she pondered the meaning of that Scripture she so often quotes: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; . . . they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”
Two different artists
A Christian Scientist and an opponent are like two artists. One says: “I have spiritual ideals, indestructible and glorious. When others see them as I do, in their true light and loveliness,–and know that these ideals are real and eternal because drawn from Truth,–they will find that nothing is lost, and all is won, by a right estimate of what is real.”
The other artist replies: “You wrong my experience. I have no mind-ideals except those which are both mental and material. It is true that materiality renders these ideals imperfect and destructible; yet I would not exchange mine for thine, for mine give me such personal pleasure, and they are not so shockingly transcendental. They require less self-abnegation, and keep Soul well out of sight. Moreover, I have no notion of losing my old doctrines or human opinions.”
Choose ye to-day
Dear reader, which mind-picture or externalized thought shall be real to you,–the material or the spiritual? Both you cannot have. You are bringing out your own ideal. This ideal is either temporal or eternal. Either Spirit or matter is your model. If you try to have two models, then you practically have none. Like a pendulum in a clock, you will be thrown back and forth, striking the ribs of matter and swinging between the real and the unreal.
Hear the wisdom of Job, as given in the excellent translation of the late Rev. George R. Noyes, D.D.:
Shall mortal man be more just than God?
Shall man be more pure than his Maker?
Behold, He putteth no trust in His ministering spirits,
And His angels He chargeth with frailty.
Of old, the Jews put to death the Galilean Prophet, the best Christian on earth, for the truth he spoke and demonstrated, while to-day, Jew and Christian can unite in doctrine and denomination on the very basis of Jesus’ words and works. The Jew believes that the Messiah or Christ has not yet come; the Christian believes that Christ is God. Here Christian Science intervenes, explains these doctrinal points, cancels the disagreement, and settles the question. Christ, as the true spiritual idea, is the ideal of God now and forever, here and everywhere. The Jew who believes in the First Commandment is a monotheist; he has one omnipresent God. Thus the Jew unites with the Christian’s doctrine that God is come and is present now and forever. The Christian who believes in the First Commandment is a monotheist. This he virtually unites with the Jew’s belief in one God, and recognizes that Jesus Christ is not God, as Jesus himself declared, but is the Son of God. This declaration of Jesus, understood, conflicts not at all with another of his sayings: “I and my Father are one,”–that is, one in quality, not in quantity. As a drop of water is one with the ocean, a ray of light one with the, sun, even so God and man, Father and son, are one in being. The Scripture reads: “For in Him we live, and move, and have our being.”
I have revised Science and Health only to give a clearer and fuller expression of its original meaning. Spiritual ideas unfold as we advance. A human perception of divine Science, however limited, must be correct in order to be Science and subject to demonstration. A germ of infinite Truth, though least in the kingdom of heaven is the higher hope on earth, but it will be rejected and reviled until God prepares the soil for the seed. That which when sown bears immortal fruit, enriches mankind only when it is understood,–hence the many readings given the Scriptures, and the requisite revisions of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
Chapter XII – Christian Science Practice
Why art thou cast down, O my soul [sense]? And why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise Him, Who is the health of my countenance and my God.–PSALMS.
And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils: they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.–JESUS.
A gospel narrative
IT is related in the seventh chapter of Luke’s Gospel that Jesus was once the honored guest of a certain Pharisee, by name Simon, though he was quite unlike Simon the disciple. While they were at meat, an unusual incident occurred, as if to interrupt the scene of Oriental festivity. A “strange woman” came in. Heedless of the fact that she was debarred from such a place and such society, especially under the stern rules of rabbinical law, as positively as if she were a Hindoo pariah intruding upon the household of a high-caste Brahman, this woman (Mary Magdalene, as she has since been called) approached Jesus. According to the custom of those days, he reclined on a couch with his head towards the table and his bare feet away from it. It was therefore easy for the Magdalen to come behind the couch and reach his feet. She bore an alabaster jar containing costly and fragrant oil,–sandal oil perhaps, which is in such common use in the East. Breaking the sealed jar, she perfumed Jesus’ feet with the oil, wiping them with her long hair, which hung loosely about her shoulders, as was customary with women of her grade.
Parable of the creditor
Did Jesus spurn the woman? Did he repel her adoration? No! He regarded her compassionately. Nor was this all. Knowing what those around him were saying in their hearts, especially his host, – that they were wondering why, being a prophet, the exalted guest did not at once detect the woman’s immoral status and bid her depart,–knowing this, Jesus rebuked them with a short story or parable. He described two debtors, one for a large sum and one for a smaller, who were released from their obligations by their common creditor. “Which of them will love him most?” was the Master’s question to Simon the Pharisee; and Simon replied, “He to whom he forgave most.” Jesus approved the answer, and so brought home the lesson to all, following it with that remarkable declaration to the woman, “Thy sins are forgiven.”
Divine insight
Why did he thus summarize her debt to divine Love? Had she repented and reformed, and did his insight detect this unspoken moral uprising? She bathed his feet with her tears before she anointed them with the oil. In the absence of other proofs, was her grief sufficient evidence to warrant the expectation of her repentance, reformation, and growth in wisdom? Certainly there was encouragement in the mere fact that she was showing her affection for a man of undoubted goodness and purity, who has since been rightfully regarded as the best man that ever trod this planet. Her reverence was unfeigned, and it was manifested towards one who was soon, though they knew it not, to lay down his mortal existence in behalf of all sinners, that through his word and works they might be redeemed from sensuality and sin.
Penitence or hospitality
Which was the higher tribute to such ineffable affection, the hospitality of the Pharisee or the contrition of the Magdalen? This query Jesus answered by rebuking self-righteousness and declaring the absolution of the penitent. He even said that this poor woman had done what his rich entertainer had neglected to do,–wash and anoint his guest’s feet, a special sign of Oriental courtesy.
Here is suggested a solemn question, a question indicated by one of the needs of this age. Do Christian Scientists seek Truth as Simon sought the Saviour, through material conservatism and for personal homage? Jesus told Simon that such seekers as he gave small reward in return for the spiritual purgation which came through the Messiah. If Christian Scientists are like Simon, then it must be said of them also that they love little.
Genuine repentance
On the other hand, do they show their regard for Truth, or Christ, by their genuine repentance, by their broken hearts, expressed by meekness and human affection, as did this woman? If so, then it may be said of them, as Jesus said of the unwelcome visitor, that they indeed love much, because much is forgiven them.
Compassion requisite
Did the careless doctor, the nurse, the cook, and the brusque business visitor sympathetically know the thorns they plant in the pillow of the sick and the heavenly homesick looking away from earth,–Oh, did they know!–this knowledge would do much more towards healing the sick and preparing their helpers for the “midnight call,” than all cries of “Lord, Lord!” The benign thought of Jesus, finding utterance in such words as “Take no thought for your life,” would heal the sick, and so enable them to rise above the supposed necessity for physical thought-taking and doctoring; but if the unselfish affections be lacking, and common sense and common humanity are disregarded, what mental quality remains, with which to evoke healing from the outstretched arm of righteousness?
Speedy healing
If the Scientist reaches his patient through divine Love, the healing work will be accomplished at one visit, and the disease will vanish into its native nothingness like dew before the morning sunshine. If the Scientist has enough Christly affection to win his own pardon, and such commendation as the Magdalen gained from Jesus, then he is Christian enough to practise scientifically and deal with his patients compassionately; and the result will correspond with the spiritual intent.
Truth desecrated
If hypocrisy, stolidity, inhumanity, or vice finds its way into the chambers of disease through the would-be healer, it would, if it were possible, convert into a den of thieves the temple of the Holy Ghost, – the patient’s spiritual power to resuscitate himself. The unchristian practitioner is not giving to mind or body the joy and strength of Truth. The poor suffering heart needs its rightful nutriment, such as peace, patience in tribulation, and a priceless sense of the dear Father’s loving-kindness.
Moral evils to be cast out
In order to cure his patient, the metaphysician must first cast moral evils out of himself and thus attain the spiritual freedom which will enable him to cast physical evils out of his patient; but heal he cannot, while his own spiritual barrenness debars him from giving drink to the thirsty and hinders him from reaching his patient’s thought, yea, while mental penury chills his faith and understanding.
The true physician
The physician who lacks sympathy for his fellowbeing is deficient in human affection, and we have the apostolic warrant for asking: “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” Not having this spiritual affection, the physician lacks faith in the divine Mind and has not that recognition of infinite Love which alone confers the healing power. Such so-called Scientists will strain out gnats, while they swallow the camels of bigoted pedantry.
Source of calmness
The physician must also watch, lest he be overwhelmed by a sense of the odiousness of sin and by the unveiling of sin in his own thoughts. The sick are terrified by their sick beliefs, and sinners should be affrighted by their sinful beliefs; but the Christian Scientist will be calm in the presence of both sin and disease, knowing, as he does, that Life is God and God is All.
Genuine healing
If we would open their prison doors for the sick, we must first learn to bind up the broken-hearted. If we would heal by the Spirit, we must not hide the talent of spiritual healing under the napkin of its form, nor bury the morale of Christian Science in the grave-clothes of its letter. The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love.
Gratitude and humility
This is what is meant by seeking Truth, Christ, not “for the loaves and fishes,” nor, like the Pharisee, with the arrogance of rank and display of scholarship, but like Mary Magdalene, from the summit of devout consecration, with the oil of gladness and the perfume of gratitude, with tears of repentance and with those hairs all numbered by the Father.
The salt of the earth
A Christian Scientist occupies the place at this period of which Jesus spoke to his disciples, when he said: “Ye are the salt of the earth.” “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.” Let us watch, work, and pray that this salt lose not its saltness, and that this light be not hid, but radiate and glow into noontide glory.
The infinite Truth of the Christ-cure has come to this age through a “still, small voice,” through silent utterances and divine anointing which quicken and increase the beneficial effects of Christianity. I long to see the consummation of my hope, namely, the student’s higher attainments in this line of light.
Real and counterfeit
Because Truth is infinite, error should be known as nothing. Because Truth is omnipotent in goodness, error, Truth’s opposite, has no might. Evil is but the counterpoise of nothingness. The greatest wrong is but a supposititious opposite of the highest right. The confidence inspired by Science lies in the fact that Truth is real and error is unreal. Error is a coward before Truth. Divine Science insists that time will prove all this. Both truth and error have come nearer than ever before to the apprehension of mortals, and truth will become still clearer as error is selfdestroyed.
Results of faith in Truth
Against the fatal beliefs that error is as real as Truth, that evil is equal in power to good if not superior, and that discord is as normal as harmony, even the hope of freedom from the bondage of sickness and sin has little inspiration to nerve endeavor. When we come to have more faith in the truth of being than we have in error, more faith in Spirit than in matter, more faith in living than in dying, more faith in God than in man, then no material suppositions can prevent us from healing the sick and destroying error.
Life independent of matter
That Life is not contingent on bodily conditions is proved, when we learn that life and man survive this body. Neither evil, disease, nor death can be spiritual, and the material belief in them disappears in the ratio of one’s spiritual growth. Because matter has no consciousness or Ego, it cannot act; its conditions are illusions, and these false conditions are the source of all seeming sickness. Admit the existence of matter, and you admit that mortality (and therefore disease) has a foundation in fact. Deny the existence of matter, and you can destroy the belief in material conditions. When fear disappears, the foundation of disease is gone. Once let the mental physician believe in the reality of matter, and he is liable to admit also the reality of all discordant conditions, and this hinders his destroying them. Thus he is unfitted for the successful treatment of disease.
Man’s entity
In proportion as matter loses to human sense all entity as man, in that proportion does man become its master. He enters into a diviner sense of the facts, and comprehends the theology of Jesus as demonstrated in healing the sick, raising the dead, and walking over the wave. All these deeds manifested Jesus’ control over the belief that matter is substance, that it can be the arbiter of life or the constructor of any form of existence.
The Christ treatment
We never read that Luke or Paul made a reality of disease in order to discover some means of healing it. Jesus never asked if disease were acute or chronic, and he never recommended attention to laws of health, never give drugs, never prayed to know if God were willing that a man should live. He understood man, whose life is God, to be immortal, and knew that man has not two lives, one to be destroyed and the other to be made indestructible.
Matter not medicine
The prophylactic and therapeutic (that is, the preventive and curative) arts belong emphatically to Christian Science, as would be readily seen, if psychology, or the Science of Spirit, God, was understood. Unscientific methods are finding their dead level. Limited to matter by their own law, what have they of the advantages of Mind and immortality?
No healing in sin
No man is physically healed in wilful error or by it, any more than he is morally saved in or by sin. It is error even to murmur or to be angry over sin. To be every whit whole, man must be better spiritually as well as physically. To be immortal, we must forsake the mortal sense of things, turn from the lie of false belief to Truth, and gather the facts of being from the divine Mind. The body improves under the same regimen which spiritualizes the thought; and if health is not made manifest under this regimen, this proves that fear is governing the body. This is the law of cause and effect, or like producing like.
Like curing like
Homoeopathy furnishes the evidence to the senses, that symptoms, which might be produced by a certain drug, are removed by using the same drug which might cause the symptoms. This confirms my theory that faith in the drug is the sole factor in the cure. The effect, which mortal mind produces through one belief, it removes through an opposite belief, but it uses the same medicine in both cases.
The moral and spiritual facts of health, whispered into thought, produce very direct and marked effects on the body. A physical diagnosis of disease – since mortal mind must be the cause of disease–tends to induce disease.
Transient potency of drugs
According to both medical testimony and individual experience, a drug may eventually lose its supposed power and do no more for the patient. Hygienic treatment also loses its efficacy. Quackery likewise fails at length to inspire the credulity of the sick, and then they cease to improve. These lessons are useful. They should naturally and genuinely change our basis from sensation to Christian Science, from error to Truth, from matter to Spirit.
Diagnosis of matter
Physicians examine the pulse, tongue, lungs, to discover the condition of matter, when in fact all is Mind. The body is the substratum of mortal mind, and this so-called mind must finally yield to the mandate of immortal Mind.
Ghost-stories inducing fear
Disquisitions on disease have a mental effect similar to that produced on children by telling ghost-stories in the dark. By those uninstructed in Christian Science, nothing is really understood of material existence. Mortals are believed to be here without their consent and to be removed as involuntarily, not knowing why nor when. As frightened children look everywhere for the imaginary ghost, so sick humanity sees danger in every direction, and looks for relief in all ways except the right one. Darkness induces fear. The adult, in bondage to his beliefs, no more comprehends his real being than does the child; and the adult must be taken out of his darkness, before he can get rid of the illusive sufferings which throng the gloaming. The way in divine Science is the only way out of this condition.
Mind imparts purity, health, and beauty
I would not transform the infant at once into a man, nor would I keep the suckling a lifelong babe. No impossible thing do I ask when urging the claims of Christian Science; but because this teaching is in advance of the age, we should not deny our need of its spiritual unfoldment. Mankind will improve through Science and Christianity. The necessity for uplifting the race is father to the fact that Mind can do it; for Mind can impart purity instead of impurity, strength instead of weakness, and health instead of disease. Truth is an alterative in the entire system, and can make it “every whit whole.”
Brain not intelligent
Remember, brain is not mind. Matter cannot be sick, and Mind is immortal. The mortal body is only an erroneous mortal belief of mind in matter. What you call matter was originally error in solution, elementary mortal mind,–likened by Milton to “chaos and old night.” One theory about this mortal mind is, that its sensations can reproduce man, can form blood, flesh, and bones. The Science of being, in which all is divine Mind, or God and His idea, would be clearer in this age, but for the belief that matter is the medium of man, or that man can enter his own embodied thought, bind himself with his own beliefs, and then call his bonds material and name them divine law.
Veritable success
When man demonstrates Christian Science absolutely, he will be perfect. He can neither sin, suffer, be subject to matter, nor disobey the law of God. Therefore he will be as the angels in heaven. Christian Science and Christianity are one. How, then, in Christianity any more than in Christian Science, can we believe in the reality and power of both Truth and error, Spirit and matter, and hope to succeed with contraries? Matter is not self-sustaining. Its false supports fail one after another. Matter succeeds for a period only by falsely parading in the vestments of law.
Recognition of benefits
“Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.” In Christian Science, a denial of Truth is fatal, while a just acknowledgment of Truth and of what it has done for us is an effectual help. If pride, superstition, or any error prevents the honest recognition of benefits received, this will be a hindrance to the recovery of the sick and the success of the student.
Disease far more docile than iniquity
If we are Christians on all moral questions, but are in darkness as to the physical exemption which Christianity includes, then we must have more faith in God on this subject and be more alive to His promises. It is easier to cure the most malignant disease than it is to cure sin. The author has raised up the dying, partly because they were willing to be restored, while she has struggled long, and perhaps in vain, to lift a student out of a chronic sin. Under all modes of pathological treatment, the sick recover more rapidly from disease than does the sinner from his sin. Healing is easier than teaching, if the teaching is faithfully done.
Love frees from fear
The fear of disease and the love of sin are the sources of man’s enslavement. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” but the Scriptures also declare, through the exalted thought of John, that “perfect Love casteth out fear.”
The fear occasioned by ignorance can be cured; but to remove the effects of fear produced by sin, you must rise above both fear and sin. Disease is expressed not so much by the lips as in the functions of the body. Establish the scientific sense of health, and you relieve the oppressed organ. The inflammation, decomposition, or deposit will abate, and the disabled organ will resume its healthy functions.
Mind circulates blood
When the blood rushes madly through the veins or languidly creeps along its frozen channels, we call these conditions disease. This is a misconception. Mortal mind is producing the propulsion or the languor, and we prove this to be so when by mental means the circulation is changed, and returns to that standard which mortal mind has decided upon as essential for health. Anodynes, counter-irritants, and depletion never reduce inflammation scientifically, but the truth of being, whispered into the ear of mortal mind, will bring relief.
Mind can destroy all ills
Hatred and its effects on the body are removed by Love. Because mortal mind seems to be conscious, the sick say: “How can my mind cause a disease I never thought of and knew nothing about, until it appeared on my body?” The author has answered this question in her explanation of disease as originating in human belief before it is consciously apparent on the body, which is in fact the objective state of mortal mind, though it is called matter. This mortal blindness and its sharp consequences show our need of divine metaphysics. Through immortal Mind, or Truth, we can destroy all ills which proceed from mortal mind.
Ignorance of the cause or approach of disease is no argument against the mental origin of disease. You confess to ignorance of the future and incapacity to preserve your own existence, and this belief helps rather than hinders disease. Such a state of mind induces sickness. It is like walking in darkness on the edge of a precipice. You cannot forget the belief of danger, and your steps are less firm because of your fear, and ignorance of mental cause and effect.
Temperature is mental
Heat and cold are products of mortal mind. The body, when bereft of mortal mind, at first cools, and afterwards it is resolved into its primitive mortal elements. Nothing that lives ever dies, and vice versa. Mortal mind produces animal heat, and then expels it through the abandonment of a belief, or increases it to the point of self-destruction. Hence it is mortal mind, not matter, which says, “I die.” Heat would pass from the body as painlessly as gas dissipates into the air when it evaporates but for the belief that inflammation and pain must accompany the separation of heat from the body.
Science versus hypnotism
Chills and heat are often the form in which fever manifests itself. Change the mental state, and the chills and fever disappear. The old-school physician proves this when his patient says, ” I am better,” but the patient believes that matter, not mind, has helped him. The Christian Scientist demonstrates that divine Mind heals, while the hypnotist dispossesses the patient of his individuality in order to control him. No person is benefited by yielding his mentality to any mental despotism or malpractice. All unscientific mental practice is erroneous and powerless, and should be understood and so rendered fruitless. The genuine Christian Scientist is adding to his patient’s mental and moral power, and is increasing his patient’s spirituality while restoring him physically through divine Love.
Cure for palsy
Palsy is a belief that matter governs mortals, and can paralyze the body, making certain portions of it motionless. Destroy the belief, show mortal mind that muscles have no power to be lost, for Mind is supreme, and you cure the palsy.
Latent fear diagnosed
Consumptive patients always show great hopefulness and courage, even when they are supposed to be in hopeless danger. This state of mind seems anomalous except to the expert in Christian Science. This mental state is not understood, simply because it is a stage of fear so excessive that it amounts to fortitude. The belief in consumption presents to mortal thought a hopeless state, an image more terrifying than that of most other diseases. The patient turns involuntarily from the contemplation of it, but though unacknowledged, the latent fear and the despair of recovery remain in thought.
Insidious concepts
Just so is it with the greatest sin. It is the most subtle, and does its work almost self-deceived. The diseases deemed dangerous sometimes come from the most hidden, undefined, and insidious beliefs. The pallid invalid, whom you declare to be wasting away with consumption of the blood, should be told that blood never gave life and can never take it away,–that Life is Spirit, and that there is more life and immortality in one good motive and act, than in all the blood which ever flowed through mortal veins and simulated a corporeal sense of life.
Remedy for fever
If the body is material, it cannot, for that very reason, suffer with a fever. Because the so-called material body is a mental concept and governed by mortal mind, it manifests only what that so-called mind expresses. Therefore the efficient remedy is to destroy the patient’s false belief by both silently and audibly arguing the true facts in regard to harmonious being,–representing man as healthy instead of diseased, and showing that it is impossible for matter to suffer, to feel pain or heat, to be thirsty or sick. Destroy fear, and you end fever. Some people, mistaught as to Mindscience, inquire when it will be safe to check a fever. Know that in Science you cannot check a fever after admitting that it must have its course. To fear and admit the power of disease, is to paralyze mental and scientific demonstration.
If your patient believes in taking cold, mentally convince him that matter cannot take cold, and that thought governs this liability. If grief causes suffering, convince the sufferer that affliction is often the source of joy, and that he should rejoice always in ever-present Love.
Climate harmless
Invalids flee to tropical climates in order to save their lives, but they come back no better than when they went away. Then is the time to cure them through Christian Science, and prove that they can be healthy in all climates, when their fear of climate is exterminated.
Mind governs body
Through different states of mind, the body becomes suddenly weak or abnormally strong, showing mortal mind to be the producer of strength or weakness. A sudden joy or grief has caused what is termed instantaneous death. Because a belief originates unseen, the mental state should be continually watched that it may not produce blindly its bad effects. The author never knew a patient who did not recover when the belief of the disease had gone. Remove the leading error or governing fear of this lower so-called mind, and you remove the cause of all disease as well as the morbid or excited action of any organ. You also remove in this way what are termed organic diseases as readily as functional difficulties.
The cause of all so-called disease is mental, a mortal fear, a mistaken belief or conviction of the necessity and power of ill-health; also a fear that Mind is helpless to defend the life of man and incompetent to control it. Without this ignorant human belief, any circumstance is of itself powerless to produce suffering. It is latent belief in disease, as well as the fear of disease, which associates sickness with certain circumstances and causes the two to appear conjoined, even as poetry and music are reproduced in union by human memory. Disease has no intelligence. Unwittingly you sentence yourself to suffer. The understanding of this will enable you to commute this self-sentence, and meet every circumstance with truth. Disease is less than mind, and Mind can control it.
Latent power
Without the so-called human mind, there can be no inflammatory nor torpid action of the system. Remove the error, and you destroy its effects. By looking a tiger fearlessly in the eye, Sir Charles Napier sent it cowering back into the jungle. An animal may infuriate another by looking it in the eye, and both will fight for nothing. A man’s gaze, fastened fearlessly on a ferocious beast, often causes the beast to retreat in terror. This latter occurrence represents the power of Truth over error,–the might of intelligence exercised over mortal beliefs to destroy them; whereas hypnotism and hygienic drilling and drugging, adopted to cure matter, is represented by two material erroneous bases.
Disease powerless
Disease is not an intelligence to dispute the empire of Mind or to dethrone Mind and take the government into its own hands. Sickness is not a God-given, nor a self-constituted material power, which copes astutely with Mind and finally conquers it. God never endowed matter with power to disable Life or to chill harmony with a long and cold night of discord. Such a power, without the divine permission, is inconceivable; and if such a power could be divinely directed, it would manifest less wisdom than we usually find displayed in human governments.
Jurisdiction of Mind
If disease can attack and control the body without the consent of mortals, sin can do the same, for both are errors, announced as partners in the beginning. The Christian Scientist finds only effects, where the ordinary physician looks for causes. The real jurisdiction of the world is in Mind, controlling every effect and recognizing all causation as vested in divine Mind.
Power of imagination
A felon, on whom certain English students experimented, fancied himself bleeding to death, and died because of that belief, when only a stream of warm water was trickling over his arm. Had he known his sense of bleeding was an illusion, he would have risen above the false belief. Let the despairing invalid, inspecting the hue of her blood on a cambric handkerchief, think of the experiment of those Oxford boys, who caused the death of a man, when not a drop of his blood was shed. Then let her learn the opposite statement of life as taught in Christian Science, and she will understand that she is not dying on account of the state of her blood, but is suffering from her belief that blood is destroying her life. The so-called vital current does not affect the invalid’s health, but her belief produces the very results she dreads.
Fevers the effect of fear
Fevers are errors of various types. The quickened pulse, coated tongue, febrile heat, dry skin, pain in the head and limbs, are pictures drawn on the body by a mortal mind. The images, held in this disturbed mind, frighten conscious thought. Unless the fever-picture, drawn by millions of mortals and imaged on the body through the belief that mind is in matter and discord is as real as harmony, is destroyed through Science, it may rest at length on some receptive thought, and become a fever case, which ends in a belief called death, which belief must be finally conquered by eternal Life. Truth is always the victor. Sickness and sin fall by their own weight. Truth is the rock of ages, the headstone of the corner, “but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.”
Misdirected contention
Contending for the evidence or indulging the demands of sin, disease, or death, we virtually contend against the control of Mind over body, and deny the power of Mind to heal. This false method is as though the defendant should argue for the plaintiff in favor of a decision which the defendant knows will be turned against himself.
Benefits of metaphysics
The physical effects of fear illustrate its illusion. Gazing at a chained lion, crouched for a spring, should not terrify a man. The body is affected only with the belief of disease produced by a so-called mind ignorant of the truth which chains disease. Nothing but the power of Truth can prevent the fear of error, and prove man’s dominion over error.
A higher discovery
Many years ago the author made a spiritual discovery, the scientific evidence of which has accumulated to prove that the divine Mind produces in man health, harmony, and immortality. Gradually this evidence will gather momentum and clearness, until it reaches its culmination of scientific statement and proof. Nothing is more disheartening than to believe that there is a power opposite to God, or good, and that God endows this opposing power with strength to be used against Himself, against Life, health, harmony.
Ignorance of our rights
Every law of matter or the body, supposed to govern man, is rendered null and void by the law of Life, God. Ignorant of our God-given rights, we submit to unjust decrees, and the bias of education enforces this slavery. Be no more willing to suffer the illusion that you are sick or that some disease is developing in the system, than you are to yield to a sinful temptation on the ground that sin has its necessities.
No laws of matter
When infringing some supposed law, you say that there is danger. This fear is the danger and induces the physical effects. We cannot in reality suffer from breaking anything except a moral or spiritual law. The so-called laws of mortal belief are destroyed by the understanding that Soul is immortal, and that mortal mind cannot legislate the times, periods, and types of disease, with which mortals die. God is the lawmaker, but He is not the author of barbarous codes. In infinite Life and Love there is no sickness, sin, nor death, and the Scriptures declare that we live, move, and have our being in the infinite God.
God-given dominion
Think less of the enactments of mortal mind, and you will sooner grasp man’s God-given dominion. You must understand your way out of human theories relating to health, or you will never believe that you are quite free from some ailment. The harmony and immortality of man will never be reached without the understanding that Mind is not in matter. Let us banish sickness as an outlaw, and abide by the rule of perpetual harmony,–God’s law. It is man’s moral right to annul an unjust sentence, a sentence never inflicted by divine authority.
Begin rightly
Christ Jesus overruled the error which would impose penalties for transgressions of the physical laws of health; he annulled supposed laws of matter, opposed to the harmonies of Spirit, lacking divine authority and having only human approval for their sanction.
Hygiene excessive
If half the attention given to hygiene were given to the study of Christian Science and to the spiritualization of thought, this alone would usher in the milleninium. Constant bathing and rubbing to alter the secretions or to remove unhealthy exhalations from the cuticle receive a useful rebuke from Jesus’ precept, “Take no thought . . . for the body.” We must beware of making clean merely the outside of the platter.
Blissful ignorance
He, who is ignorant of what is termed hygienic law, is more receptive of spiritual power and of faith in one God, than is the devotee of supposed hygienic law, who comes to teach the so-called ignorant one. Must we not then consider the so-called law of matter a canon “more honored in the breach than the observance”? A patient thoroughly booked in medical theories is more difficult to heal through Mind than one who is not. This verifies the saying of our Master: “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, shall in no wise enter therein.”
One whom I rescued from seeming spiritual oblivion, in which the senses had engulfed him, wrote to me: “I should have died, but for the glorious Principle you teach, – supporting the power of Mind over the body and showing me the nothingness of the so-called pleasures and pains of sense. The treatises I had read and the medicines I had taken only abandoned me to more hopeless suffering and despair. Adherence to hygiene was useless. Mortal mind needed to be set right. The ailment was not bodily, but mental, and I was cured when I learned my way in Christian Science.”
A clean mind and body
We need a clean body and a clean mind,–a body rendered pure by Mind as well as washed by water. One says: “I take good care of my body.” To do this, the pure and exalting influence of the divine Mind on the body is requisite, and the Christian Scientist takes the best care of his body when he leaves it most out of his thought, and, like the Apostle Paul, is “willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.”
A hint may be taken from the emigrant, whose filth does not affect his happiness, because mind and body rest on the same basis. To the mind equally gross, dirt gives no uneasiness. It is the native element of such a mind, which is symbolized, and not chafed, by its surroundings; but impurity and uncleanliness, which do not trouble the gross, could not be borne by the refined. This shows that the mind must be clean to keep the body in proper condition.
Beliefs illusive
The tobacco-user, eating or smoking poison for half a century, sometimes tells you that the weed preserves his health, but does this make it so? Does his assertion prove the use of tobacco to be a salubrious habit, and man to be the better for it? Such instances only prove the illusive physical effect of a false belief, confirming the Scriptural conclusion concerning a man, “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
The movement-cure–pinching and pounding the poor body, to make it sensibly well when it ought to be insensibly so–is another medical mistake, resulting from the common notion that health depends on inert matter instead of on Mind. Can matter, or what is termed matter, either feel or act without mind?
Corporeal penalties
We should relieve our minds from the depressing thought that we have transgressed a material law and must of necessity pay the penalty. Let us reassure ourselves with the law of Love. God never punishes man for doing right, for honest labor, or for deeds of kindness, though they expose him to fatigue, cold, heat, contagion. If man seems to incur the penalty through matter, this is but a belief of mortal mind, not an enactment of wisdom, and man has only to enter his protest against this belief in order to annul it. Through this action of thought and its results upon the body, the student will prove to himself, by small beginnings, the grand verities of Christian Science.
Not matter, but Mind
If exposure to a draught of air while in a state of perspiration is followed by chills, dry cough, influenza, congestive symptoms in the lungs, or hints of inflammatory rheumatism, your Mind-remedy is safe and sure. If you are a Christian Scientist, such symptoms are not apt to follow exposure; but if you believe in laws of matter and their fatal effects when transgressed, you are not fit to conduct your own case or to destroy the bad effects of your belief. When the fear subsides and the conviction abides that you have broken no law, neither rheumatism, consumption, nor any other disease will ever result from exposure to the weather. In Science this is an established fact which all the evidence before the senses can never overrule.
Benefit of philanthropy
Sickness, sin, and death must at length quail before the divine rights of intelligence, and then the power of Mind over the entire functions and organs of the human system will be acknowledged. It is proverbial that Florence Nightingale and other philanthropists engaged in humane labors have been able to undergo without sinking fatigues and exposures which ordinary people could not endure. The explanation lies in the support which they derived from the divine law, rising above the human. The spiritual demand, quelling the material, supplies energy and endurance surpassing all other aids, and forestalls the penalty which our beliefs would attach to our best deeds. Let us remember that the eternal law of right, though it can never annul the law which makes sin its own executioner, exempts man from all penalties but those due for wrong-doing.
Honest toil has no penalty
Constant toil, deprivations, exposures, and all untoward conditions, if without sin, can be experienced without suffering. Whatever it is your duty to do, you can do without harm to yourself. If you sprain the muscles or wound the flesh, your remedy is at hand. Mind decides whether or not the flesh shall be discolored, painful, swollen, and inflamed.
Our sleep and food
You say that you have not slept well or have overeaten. You are a law unto yourself. Saying this and believing it, you will suffer in proportion to your belief and fear. Your sufferings are not the penalty for having broken a law of matter, for it is a law of mortal mind which you have disobeyed. You say or think, because you have partaken of salt fish, that you must be thirsty, and you are thirsty accordingly, while the opposite belief would produce the opposite result.
Doubtful evidence
Any supposed information, coming from the body or from inert matter as if either were intelligent, is an illusion of mortal mind,–one of its dreams. Realize that the evidence of the senses is not to be accepted in the case of sickness, any more than it is in the case of sin.
Climate and belief
Expose the body to certain temperatures, and belief says that you may catch cold and have catarrh; but no such result occurs without mind to demand it and produce it. So long as mortals declare that certain states of the atmosphere produce catarrh, fever, rheumatism, or consumption, those effects will follow,–not because of the climate, but on account of the belief. The author has in too many instances healed disease through the action of Truth on the minds of mortals, and the corresponding effects of Truth on the body, not to know that this is so.
Erroneous despatch
A blundering despatch, mistakenly announcing the death of a friend, occasions the same grief that the friend’s real death would bring. You think that your anguish is occasioned by your loss. Another despatch, correcting the mistake, heals your grief, and you learn that your suffering was merely the result of your belief. Thus it is with all sorrow, sickness, and death. You will learn at length that there is no cause for grief, and divine wisdom will then be understood. Error, not Truth, produces all the suffering on earth.
Mourning causeless
If a Christian Scientist had said, while you were laboring under the influence of the belief of grief, “Your sorrow is without cause,” you would not have understood him, although the correctness of the assertion might afterwards be proved to you. So, when our friends pass from our sight and we lament, that lamentation is needless and causeless. We shall perceive this to be true when we grow into the understanding of Life, and know that there is no death.
Mind heals brain-disease
Because mortal mind is kept active, must it pay the penalty in a softened brain? Who dares to say that actual Mind can be overworked? When we reach our limits of mental endurance, we conclude that intellectual labor has been carried sufficiently far; but when we realize that immortal Mind is ever active, and that spiritual energies can neither wear out nor can so-called material law trespass upon God-given powers and resources, we are able to rest in Truth, refreshed by the assurances of immortality, opposed to mortality.
Right never punishable
Our thinkers do not die early because they faithfully perform the natural functions of being. If printers and authors have the shortest span of earthly existence, it is not because they occupy the most important posts and perform the most vital functions in society. That man does not pay the severest penalty who does the most good. By adhering to the realities of eternal existence,–instead of reading disquisitions on the inconsistent supposition that death comes in obedience to the law of life, and that God punishes man for doing good,–one cannot suffer as the result of any labor of love, but grows stronger because of it. It is a law of socalled mortal mind, misnamed matter, which causes all things discordant.
Christian history
The history of Christianity furnishes sublime proofs of the supporting influence and protecting power bestowed on man by his heavenly Father, omnipotent Mind, who gives man faith and understanding whereby to defend himself, not only from temptation, but from bodily suffering.
The Christian martyrs were prophets of Christian Science. Through the uplifting and consecrating power of divine Truth, they obtained a victory over the corporeal senses, a victory which Science alone can explain. Stolidity, which is a resisting state of mortal mind, suffers less, only because it knows less of material law.
The Apostle John testified to the divine basis of Christian Science, when dire inflictions failed to destroy his body. Idolaters, believing in more than one mind, had “gods many,” and thought that they could kill the body with matter, independently of mind.
Sustenance spiritual
Admit the common hypothesis that food is the nutriment of life, and the follows the necessity for another admission in the opposite direction,–that food has power to destroy Life, God, through a deficiency or an excess, a quality or a quantity. This is a specimen of the ambiguous nature of all material health-theories. They are self-contradictory and self-destructive, constituting a “kingdom divided against itself,” which is “brought to desolation.” If food was prepared by Jesus for his disciples, it cannot destroy life.
God sustains man
The fact is, food does not affect the absolute Life of man, and this becomes self-evident, when we learn that God is our Life. Because sin and sickness are not qualities of Soul, or Life, we have hope in immortality; but it would be foolish to venture beyond our present understanding, foolish to stop eating until we gain perfection and a clear comprehension of the living Spirit. In that perfect day of understanding, we shall neither eat to live nor live to eat.
Diet and digestion
If mortals think that food disturbs the harmonious functions of mind and body, either the food or this thought must be dispensed with, for the penalty is coupled with the belief. Which shall it be? If this decision be left to Christian Science, it will be given in behalf of the control of Mind over this belief and every erroneous belief, or material condition. The less we know or think about hygiene, the less we are predisposed to sickness. Recollect that it is not the nerves, not matter, but mortal mind, which reports food as undigested. Matter does not inform you of bodily derangements; it is supposed to do so. This pseudo-mental testimony can be destroyed only by the better results of Mind’s opposite evidence.
Scripture rebukes
Our dietetic theories first admit that food sustains the life of man, and then discuss the certainty that food can kill man. This false reasoning is rebuked in Scripture by the metaphors about the fount and stream, the tree and its fruit, and the kingdom divided against itself. If God has, as prevalent theories maintain, instituted laws that food shall support human life, He cannot annul these regulations by an opposite law that food shall be inimical to existence.
Ancient confusion
Materialists contradict their own statements. Their belief in material laws and in penalties for their infraction is the ancient error that there is fraternity between pain and pleasure, good and evil, God and Satan. This belief totters to its falling before the battle-axe of Science.
A case of convulsions, produced by indigestion, came under my observation. In her belief the woman had chronic liver-complaint, and was then suffering from a complication of symptoms connected with this belief. I cured her in a few minutes. One instant she spoke despairingly of herself. The next minute she said, “My food is all digested, and I should like something more to eat.”
Ultimate harmony
We cannot deny that Life is self-sustained, and we should never deny the everlasting harmony of Soul, simply because, to the mortal senses, there is seeming discord. It is our ignorance of God, the divine Principle, which produces apparent discord, and the right understanding of Him restores harmony. Truth will at length compel us all to exchange the pleasures and pains of sense for the joys of Soul.
Unnecessary prostration
When the first symptoms of disease appear, dispute the testimony of the material senses with divine Science. Let your higher sense of justice destroy the false process of mortal opinions which you name law, and then you will not be confined to a sick-room nor laid upon a bed of suffering in payment of the last farthing, the last penalty demanded by error. “Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him.” Suffer no claim of sin or of sickness to grow upon the thought. Dismiss it with an abiding conviction that it is illegitimate, because you know that God is no more the author of sickness than He is of sin. You have no law of His to support the necessity either of sin or sickness, but you have divine authority for denying that necessity and healing the sick.
Treatment of disease
“Agree to disagree” with approaching symptoms of chronic or acute disease, whether it is cancer, consumption, or smallpox. Meet the incipient stages of disease with as powerful mental opposition as a legislator would employ to defeat the passage of an inhuman law. Rise in the conscious strength of the spirit of Truth to overthrow the plea of mortal mind, alias matter, arrayed against the supremacy of Spirit. Blot out the images of mortal thought and its beliefs in sickness and sin. Then, when thou art delivered to the judgment of Truth, Christ, the judge will say, “Thou art whole!”
Righteous rebellion
Instead of blind and calm submission to the incipient or advanced stages of disease, rise in rebellion against them. Banish the belief that you can possibly entertain a single intruding pain which cannot be ruled out by the might of Mind, and in this way you can prevent the development of pain in the body. No law of God hinders this result. It is error to suffer for aught but your own sins. Christ, or Truth, will destroy all other supposed suffering, and real suffering for your own sins will cease in proportion as the sin ceases.
Contradict error
Justice is the moral signification of law. Injustice declares the absence of law. When the body is supposed to say, “I am sick,” never plead guilty. Since matter cannot talk, it must be mortal mind which speaks; therefore meet the intimation with a protest. If you say, “I am sick,” you plead guilty. Then your adversary will deliver you to the judge (mortal mind), and the judge will sentence you. Disease has no intelligence to declare itself something and announce its name. Mortal mind alone sentences itself. Therefore make your own terms with sickness, and be just to yourself and to others.
Sin to be overcome
Mentally contradict every complaint from the body, and rise to the true consciousness of Life as Love,–as all that is pure, and bearing the fruits of Spirit. Fear is the fountain of sickness, and you master fear and sin through divine Mind; hence it is through divine Mind that you overcome disease. Only while fear or sin remains can it bring forth death. To cure a bodily ailment, every broken moral law should be taken into account and the error be rebuked. Fear, which is an element of all disease, must be cast out to readjust the balance for God. Casting out evil and fear enables truth to outweigh error. The only course is to take antagonistic grounds against all that is opposed to the health, holiness, and harmony of man, God’s image.
Illusions about nerves
The physical affirmation of disease should always be met with the mental negation. Whatever benefit is produced on the body, must be expressed mentally, and thought should be held fast to this ideal. If you believe in inflamed and weak nerves, you are liable to an attack from that source. You will call it neuralgia, but we call it a belief. If you think that consumption is hereditary in your family, you are liable to the development of that thought in the form of what is termed pulmonary disease, unless Science shows you otherwise. If you decide that climate or atmosphere is unhealthy, it will be so to you. Your decisions will master you, whichever direction they take.
Guarding the door
Reverse the case. Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously. When the condition is present which you say induces disease, whether it be air, exercise, heredity, contagion, or accident, then perform your office as porter and shut out these unhealthy thoughts and fears. Exclude from mortal mind the offending errors; then the body cannot suffer from them. The issues of pain or pleasure must come through mind, and like a watchman forsaking his post, we admit the intruding belief, forgetting that through divine help we can forbid this entrance.
The strength of Spirit
The body seems to be self-acting, only because mortal mind is ignorant of itself, of its own actions, and of their results, – ignorant that the predisposing, remote, and exciting cause of all bad effects is a law of so-called mortal mind, not of matter. Mind is the master of the corporeal senses, and can conquer sickness, sin, and death. Exercise this God-given authority. Take possession of your body, and govern its feeling and action. Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man.
No pain in matter
Be firm in your understanding that the divine Mind governs, and that in Science man reflects God’s government. Have no fear that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed as the result of a law of any kind, when it is self-evident that matter can have no pain nor inflammation. Your body would suffer no more from tension or wounds than the trunk of a tree which you gash or the electric wire which you stretch, were it not for mortal mind.
When Jesus declares that “the light of the body is the eye,” he certainly means that light depends upon Mind, not upon the complex humors, lenses, muscles, the iris and pupil, constituting the visual organism.
No real disease
Man is never sick, for Mind is not sick and matter cannot be. A false belief is both the tempter and the tempted, the sin and the sinner, the disease and its cause. It is well to be calm in sickness; to be hopeful is still better; but to understand that sickness is not real and that Truth can destroy its seeming reality, is best of all, for this understanding is the universal and perfect remedy.
Recuperation mental
By conceding power to discord, a large majority of doctors depress mental energy, which is the only real recuperative power. Knowledge that we can accomplish the good we hope for, stimulates the system to act in the direction which Mind points out. The admission that any bodily condition is beyond the control of Mind disarms man, prevents him from helping himself, and enthrones matter through error. To those struggling with sickness, such admissions are discouraging,–as much so as would be the advice to a man who is down in the world, that he should not try to rise above his difficulties.
Experience has proved to the author the fallacy of material systems in general,–that their theories are sometimes pernicious, and that their denials are better than their affirmations. Will you bid a man let evils overcome him, assuring him that all misfortunes are from God, against whom mortals should not contend? Will you tell the sick that their condition is hopeless, unless it can be aided by a drug or climate? Are material means the only refuge from fatal chances? Is there no divine permission to conquer discord of every kind with harmony, with Truth and Love?
Arguing wrongly
We should remember that Life is God, and that God is omnipotent. Not understanding Christian Science, the sick usually have little faith in it till they feel its beneficent influence. This shows that faith is not the healer in such cases. The sick unconsciously argue for suffering, instead of against it. They admit its reality, whereas they should deny it. They should plead in opposition to the testimony of the deceitful senses, and maintain man’s immortality and eternal likeness to God.
Divine authority
Like the great Exemplar, the healer should speak to disease as one having authority over it, leaving Soul to master the false evidences of the corporeal senses and to assert its claims over mortality and disease. The same Principle cures both sin and sickness. When divine Science overcomes faith in a carnal mind, and faith in God destroys all faith in sin and in material methods of healing, then sin, disease, and death will disappear.
Aids in sickness
Prayers, in which God is not asked to heal but is besought to take the patient to Himself, do not benefit the sick. An ill-tempered, complaining, or deceitful person should not be a nurse. The nurse should be cheerful, orderly, punctual, patient, full of faith,–receptive to Truth and Love.
Mental quackery
It is mental quackery to make disease a reality–to hold it as something seen and felt–and then to attempt its cure through Mind. It is no less erroneous to believe in the real existence of a tumor, a cancer, or decayed lungs, while you argue against their reality, than it is for your patient to feel these ills in physical belief. Mental practice, which holds disease as a reality, fastens disease on the patient, and it may appear in a more alarming form.
Effacing images of disease
The knowledge that brain-lobes cannot kill a man nor affect the functions of mind would prevent the brain from becoming diseased, though a moral offence is indeed the worst of diseases. One should never hold in mind the thought of disease, but should efface from thought all forms and types of disease, both for one’s own sake and for that of the patient.
Avoid talking disease
Avoid talking illness to the patient. Make no unnecessary inquiries relative to feelings or disease. Never startle with a discouraging remark about recovery, nor draw attention to certain symptoms as unfavorable, avoid speaking aloud the name of the disease. Never say beforehand how much you have to contend with in a case, nor encourage in the patient’s thought the expectation of growing worse before a crisis is passed.
False testimony refuted
The refutation of the testimony of material sense is not a difficult task in view of the conceded falsity of this testimony. The refutation becomes arduous, not because the testimony of sin or disease is true, but solely on account of the tenacity of belief in its truth, due to the force of education and the overwhelming weight of opinions on the wrong side,–all teaching that the body suffers, as if matter could have sensation.
Healthful explanation
At the right time explain to the sick the power which their beliefs exercise over their bodies. Give them divine and wholesome understanding, with which to combat their erroneous sense, and so efface the images of sickness from mortal mind. Keep distinctly in thought that man is the offspring of God, not of man; that man is spiritual, not material; that Soul is Spirit, outside of matter, never in it, never giving the body life and sensation. It breaks the dream of disease to understand that sickness is formed by the human mind, not by matter nor by the divine Mind.
Misleading methods
By not perceiving vital metaphysical points, not seeing how mortal mind affects the body,–acting beneficially or injuriously on the health, as well as on the morals and the happiness of mortals,–we are misled in our conclusions and methods. We throw the mental influence on the wrong side, thereby actually injuring those whom we mean to bless.
Remedy for accidents
Suffering is no less a mental condition than is enjoyment. You cause bodily sufferings and increase them by admitting their reality and continuance, as directly as you enhance your joys by believing them to be real and continuous. When an accident happens, you think or exclaim, “I am hurt!” Your thought is more powerful than your words, more powerful than the accident itself, to make the injury real.
Now reverse the process. Declare that you are not hurt and understand the reason why, and you will find the ensuing good effects to be in exact proportion to your disbelief in physics, and your fidelity to divine metaphysics, confidence in God as All, which the Scriptures declare Him to be.
Independent mentality
To heal the sick, one must be familiar with the great verities of being. Mortals are no more material in their waking hours than when they act, walk, see, hear, enjoy, or suffer in dreams. We can never treat mortal mind and matter separately, because they combine as one. Give up the belief that mind is, even temporarily, compressed within the skull, and you will quickly become more manly or womanly. You will understand yourself and your Maker better than before.
Naming maladies
Sometimes Jesus called a disease by name, as when he said to the epileptic boy, “Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him.” It is added that “the spirit [error] cried, and rent him sore and came out of him, and he was as one dead,”–clear evidence that the malady was not material. These instances show the concessions which Jesus was willing to make to the popular ignorance of spiritual Life-laws. Often he gave no name to the distemper he cured. To the synagogue ruler’s daughter, whom they called dead but of whom he said, “she is not dead, but sleepeth,” he simply said, “Damsel, I say unto thee, arise!” To the sufferer with the withered hand he said, “Stretch forth thine hand,” and it “was restored whole, like as the other.”
The action of faith
Homoeopathic remedies, sometimes not containing a particle of medicine, are known to relieve the symptoms of disease. What produces the change? It is the faith of the doctor and the patient, which reduces self-inflicted sufferings and produces a new effect upon the body. In like manner destroy the illusion of pleasure in intoxication, and the desire for strong drink is gone. Appetite and disease reside in mortal mind, not in matter.
So also faith, cooperating with a belief in the healing effects of time and medication, will soothe fear and change the belief of disease to a belief of health. Even a blind faith removes bodily ailments for a season, but hypnotism changes such ills into new and more difficult forms of disease. The Science of Mind must come to the rescue, to work a radical cure. Then we understand the process. The great fact remains that evil is not mind. Evil has no power, no intelligence, for God is good, and therefore good is infinite, is All.
Corporeal combinations
You say that certain material combinations produce disease; but if the material body causes disease, can matter cure what matter has caused? Mortal mind prescribes the drug, and administers it. Mortal mind plans the exercise, and puts the body through certain motions. No gastric gas accumulates, not a secretion nor combination can operate, apart from the action of mortal thought, alias mortal mind.
Automatic mechanism
So-called mortal mind sends its despatches over its body, but this so-called mind is both the service and message of this telegraphy. Nerves are unable to talk, and matter can return no answer to immortal Mind. If Mind is the only actor, how can mechanism be automatic? Mortal mind perpetuates its own thought. It constructs a machine, manages it, and then calls it material. A mill at work or the action of a water-wheel is but a derivative from, and continuation of, the primitive mortal mind. Without this force the body is devoid of action, and this deadness shows that so-called mortal life is mortal mind, not matter.
Mental strength
Scientifically speaking, there is no mortal mind out of which to make material beliefs, springing from illusion. This misnamed mind is not an entity. It is only a false sense of matter, since matter is not sensible. The one Mind, God, contains no mortal opinions. All that is real is included in this immortal Mind.
Confirmation in a parable
Our Master asked: “How can one enter into a strong man’s house and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man?” In other words: How can I heal the body, without beginning with so-called mortal mind, which directly controls the body? When disease is once destroyed in this so-called mind, the fear of disease is gone, and therefore the disease is thoroughly cured. Mortal mind is “the strong man,” which must be held in subjection before its influence upon health and morals can be removed. This error conquered, we can despoil “the strong man” of his goods,–namely, of sin and disease.
Eradicate error from thought
Mortals obtain the harmony of health, only as they forsake discord, acknowledge the supremacy of divine Mind, and abandon their material beliefs. Eradicate the image of disease from the perturbed thought before it has taken tangible shape in conscious thought, alias the body, and you prevent the development of disease. This task becomes easy, if you understand that every disease is an error, and has no character nor type, except what mortal mind assigns to it. By lifting thought above error, or disease, and contending persistently for truth, you destroy error.
Mortal mind controlled
When we remove disease by addressing the disturbed mind, giving no heed to the body, we prove that thought alone creates the suffering. Mortal mind rules all that is mortal. We see in the body the images of this mind, even as in optics we see painted on the retina the image which becomes visible to the senses. The action of so-called mortal mind must be destroyed by the divine Mind to bring out the harmony of being. Without divine control there is discord, manifest as sin, sickness, and death.
Mortal mind not a healer
The Scriptures plainly declare the baneful influence of sinful thought on the body. Even our Master felt this. It is recorded that in certain localities he did not many mighty works “because of their unbelief” in Truth. Any human error is its own enemy, and works against itself; it does nothing in the right direction and much in the wrong. If so-called mind is cherishing evil passions and malicious purposes, it is not a healer, but it engenders disease and death.
Effect of opposites
If faith in the truth of being, which you impart mentally while destroying error, causes chemicalization (as when an alkali is destroying an acid), it is because the truth of being must transform the error to the end of producing a higher manifestation. This fermentation should not aggravate the disease, but should be as painless to man as to a fluid, since matter has no sensation and mortal mind only feels and sees materially. What I term chemicalization is the upheaval produced when immortal Truth is destroying erroneous mortal belief. Mental chemicalization brings sin and sickness to the surface, forcing impurities to pass away, as is the case with a fermenting fluid.
Medicine and brain
The only effect produced by medicine is dependent upon mental action. If the mind were parted from the body, could you produce any effect upon the brain or body by applying the drug to either? Would the drug remove paralysis, affect organization, or restore will and action to cerebrum and cerebellum?
Skilful surgery
Until the advancing age admits the efficacy and supremacy of Mind, it is better for Christian Scientists to leave surgery and the adjustment of broken bones and dislocations to the fingers of a surgeon, while the mental healer confines himself chiefly to mental reconstruction and to the prevention of inflammation.
Christian Science is always the most skilful surgeon, but surgery is the branch of its healing which will be last acknowledged. However, it is but just to say that the author has already in her possession well-authenticated records of the cure, by herself and her students through mental surgery alone, of broken bones, dislocated joints, and spinal vertebrae.
Indestructible life of man
The time approaches when mortal mind will forsake its corporeal, structural, and material basis, when immortal Mind and its formations will be apprehended in Science, and material beliefs will not interfere with spiritual facts. Man is indestructible and eternal. Sometime it will be learned that mortal mind constructs the mortal body with this mind’s own mortal materials. In Science, no breakage nor dislocation can really occur. You say that accidents, injuries, and disease kill man, but this is not true. The life of man is Mind. The material body manifests only what mortal mind believes, whether it be a broken bone, disease, or sin.
The evil of mesmerism
We say that one human mind can influence another and in this way affect the body, but we rarely remember that we govern our own bodies. The error, mesmerism–or hypnotism, to use the recent term – illustrates the fact just stated. The operator would make his subjects believe that they cannot act voluntarily and handle themselves as they should do. If they yield to this influence, it is because their belief is not better instructed by spiritual understanding. Hence the proof that hypnotism is not scientific; Science cannot produce both disorder and order. The involuntary pleasure or pain of the person under hypnotic control is proved to be a belief without a real cause.
Wrong-doer should suffer
So the sick through their beliefs have induced their own diseased conditions. The great difference between voluntary and involuntary mesmerism is that voluntary mesmerism is induced consciously and should and does cause the perpetrator to suffer, while selfmesmerism is induced unconsciously and by his mistake a man is often instructed. In the first instance it is understood that the difficulty is a mental illusion, while in the second it is believed that the misfortune is a material effect. The human mind is employed to remove the illusion in one case, but matter is appealed to in the other. In reality, both have their origin in the human mind, and can be healed only by the divine Mind.
Error’s power imaginary
You command the situation if you understand that mortal existence is a state of self-deception and not the truth of being. Mortal mind is constantly producing on mortal body the results of false opinions; and it will continue to do so, until mortal error is deprived of its imaginary powers by Truth, which sweeps away the gossamer web of mortal illusion. The most Christian state is one of rectitude and spiritual understanding, and this is best adapted for healing the sick. Never conjure up some new discovery from dark forebodings regarding disease and then acquaint your patient with it.
Disease-production
The mortal so-called mind produces all that is unlike the immortal Mind. The human mind determines the nature of a case, and the practitioner improves or injures the case in proportion to the truth or error which influences his conclusions. The mental conception and development of disease are not understood by the patient, but the physician should be familiar with mental action and its effect in order to judge the case according to Christian Science.
Appetites to be abandoned
If a man is an inebriate, a slave to tobacco, or the special servant of any one of the myriad forms of sin, meet and destroy these errors with the truth of being, by exhibiting to the wrong-doer the suffering which his submission to such habits brings, and by convincing him that there is no real pleasure in false appetites. A corrupt mind is manifested in a corrupt body. Lust, malice, and all sorts of evil are diseased beliefs, and you can destroy them only by destroying the wicked motives which produce them. If the evil is over in the repentant mortal mind, while its effects still remain on the individual, you can remove this disorder as God’s law is fulfilled and reformation cancels the crime. The healthy sinner is the hardened sinner.
Temperance reform
The temperance reform, felt all over our land, results from metaphysical healing, which cuts down every tree that brings not forth good fruit. This conviction, that there is no real pleasure in sin, is one of the most important points in the theology of Christian Science. Arouse the sinner to this new and true view of sin, show him that sin confers no pleasure, and this knowledge strengthens his moral courage and increases his ability to master evil and to love good.
Sin or fear the root of sickness
Healing the sick and reforming the sinner are one and the same thing in Christian Science. Both cures require the same method and are inseparable in Truth. Hatred, envy, dishonesty, fear, and so forth, make a man sick, and neither material medicine nor Mind can help him permanently, even in body, unless it makes him better mentally, and so delivers him from his destroyers. The basic error is mortal mind. Hatred inflames the brutal propensities. The indulgence of evil motives and aims makes any man, who is above the lowest type of manhood, a hopeless sufferer.
Mental conspirators
Christian Science commands man to master the propensities,–to hold hatred in abeyance with kindness, to conquer lust with chastity, revenge with charity, and to overcome deceit with honesty. Choke these errors in their early stages, if you would not cherish an army of conspirators against health, happiness, and success. They will deliver you to the judge, the arbiter of truth against error. The judge will deliver you to justice, and the sentence of the moral law will be executed upon mortal mind and body. Both will be manacled until the last farthing is paid,–until you have balanced your account with God. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” The good man finally can overcome his fear of sin. This is sin’s necessity, – to destroy itself. Immortal man demonstrates the government of God, good, in which is no power to sin.
Cumulative repentence
It were better to be exposed to every plague on earth than to endure the cumulative effects of a guilty conscience. The abiding consciousness of wrongdoing tends to destroy the ability to do right. If sin is not regretted and is not lessening, then it is hastening on to physical and moral doom. You are conquered by the moral penalties you incur and the ills they bring. The pains of sinful sense are less harmful than its pleasures. Belief in material suffering causes mortals to retreat from their error, to flee from body to Spirit, and to appeal to divine sources outside of themselves.
The leaves of healing
The Bible contains the recipe for all healing. “The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Sin and sickness are both healed by the same Principle. The tree is typical of man’s divine Principle, which is equal to every emergency, offering full salvation from sin, sickness, and death. Sin will submit to Christian Science when, in place of modes and forms, the power of God is understood and demonstrated in the healing of mortals, both mind and body. “Perfect Love casteth out fear.”
Sickness will abate
The Science of being unveils the errors of sense, and spiritual perception, aided by Science, reaches Truth. Then error disappears. Sin and sickness will abate and seem less real as we approach the scientific period, in which mortal sense is subdued and all that is unlike the true likeness disappears. The moral man has no fear that he will commit a murder, and he should be as fearless on the question of disease.
Resist to the end
Resist evil–error of every sort–and it will flee from you. Error is opposed to Life. We can, and ultimately shall, so rise as to avail ourselves in every direction of the supremacy of Truth over error, Life over death, and good over evil, and this growth will go on until we arrive at the fulness of God’s idea, and no more fear that we shall be sick and die. Inharmony of any kind involves weakness and suffering,–a loss of control over the body.
Morbid cravings
The depraved appetite for alcoholic drinks, tobacco, tea, coffee, opium, is destroyed only by Mind’s mastery of the body. This normal control is gained through divine strength and understanding. There is no enjoyment in getting drunk, in becoming a fool or an object of loathing; but there is a very sharp remembrance of it, a suffering inconceivably terrible to man’s self-respect. Puffing the obnoxious fumes of tobacco, or chewing a leaf naturally attractive to no creature except a loathsome worm, is at least disgusting.
Universal panacea
Man’s enslavement to the most relentless masters passion, selfishness, envy, hatred, and revenge – is conquered only by a mighty struggle. Every hour of delay makes the struggle more severe. If man is not victorious over the passions, they crush out happiness, health, and manhood. Here Christian Science is the sovereign panacea, giving strength to the weakness of mortal mind,–strength from the immortal and omnipotent Mind,–and lifting humanity above itself into purer desires, even into spiritual power and good-will to man.
Let the slave of wrong desire learn the lessons of Christian Science, and he will get the better of that desire and ascend a degree in the scale of health, happiness, and existence.
Immortal memory
If delusion says, “I have lost my memory,” contradict it. No faculty of Mind is lost. In Science, all being is eternal, spiritual, perfect, harmonious in every action. Let the perfect model be present in your thoughts instead of its demoralized opposite. This spiritualization of thought lets in the light, and brings the divine Mind, Life not death, into your consciousness.
Sin a form of insanity
There are many species of insanity. All sin is insanity in different degrees. Sin is spared from this classification, only because its method of madness is in consonance with common mortal belief.
Every sort of sickness is error,–that is, sickness is loss of harmony. This view is not altered by the fact that sin is worse than sickness, and sickness is not acknowledged nor discovered to be error by many who are sick.
There is a universal insanity of so-called health, which mistakes fable for fact throughout the entire round of the material senses, but this general craze cannot, in a scientific diagnosis, shield the individual case from the special name of insanity. Those unfortunate people who are committed to insane asylums are only so many distinctly defined instances of the baneful effects of illusion on mortal minds and bodies.
Drugs and brain-lobes
The supposition that we can correct insanity by the use of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a mild species of insanity. Can drugs go of their own accord to the brain and destroy the so-called inflammation of disordered functions, thus reaching mortal mind through matter? Drugs do not affect a corpse, and Truth does not distribute drugs through the blood, and from them derive a supposed effect on intelligence and sentiment. A dislocation of the tarsal joint would produce insanity as perceptibly as would congestion of the brain, were it not that mortal mind thinks that the tarsal joint is less intimately connected with the mind than is the brain. Reverse the belief, and the results would be perceptibly different.
Matter and animate error
The unconscious thought in the corporeal substratum of brain produces no effect, and that condition of the body which we call sensation in matter is unreal. Mortal mind is ignorant of itself,–ignorant of the errors it includes and of their effects. Intelligent matter is an impossibility. You may say: “But if disease obtains in matter, why do you insist that disease is formed by mortal mind and not by matter?” Mortal mind and body combine as one, and the nearer matter approaches its final statement,–animate error called nerves, brain, mind,–the more prolific it is likely to become in sin and diseasebeliefs.
Dictation of error
Unconscious mortal mind – alias matter, brain – cannot dictate terms to consciousness nor say, “I am sick.” The belief, that the unconscious substratum of mortal mind, termed the body, suffers and reports disease independently of this so-called conscious mind, is the error which prevents mortals from knowing how to govern their bodies.
So-called superiority
The so-called conscious mortal mind is believed to be superior to its unconscious substratum, matter, and the stronger never yields to the weaker, except through fear or choice. The animate should be governed by God alone. The real man is spiritual and immortal, but the mortal and imperfect so-called “children of men” are counterfeits from the beginning, to be laid aside for the pure reality. This mortal is put off, and the new man or real man is put on, in proportion as mortals realize the Science of man and seek the true model.
Death no benefactor
We have no right to say that life depends on matter now, but will not depend on it after death. We cannot spend our days here in ignorance of the Science of Life, and expect to find beyond the grave a reward for this ignorance. Death will not make us harmonious and immortal as a recompense for ignorance.
If here we give no heed to Christian Science, which is spiritual and eternal, we shall not be ready for spiritual Life hereafter.
Life eternal and present
“This is life eternal,” says Jesus,–is, not shall be; and then he defines everlasting life as a present knowledge of his Father and of himself,–the knowledge of Love, Truth, and Life. “This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.” The Scriptures say, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” showing that Truth is the actual life of man; but mankind objects to making this teaching practical.
Love casteth out fear
Every trial of our faith in God makes us stronger. The more difficult seems the material condition to be overcome by Spirit, the stronger should be our faith and the purer our love. The Apostle John says: “There is no fear in Love, but perfect Love casteth out fear. . . . He that feareth is not made perfect in Love.” Here is a definite and inspired proclamation of Christian Science.
MENTAL TREATMENT ILLUSTRATED
Be not afraid
The Science of mental practice is susceptible of no misuse. Selfishness does not appear in the practice of Truth or Christian Science. If mental practice is abused or is used in any way except to promote right thinking and doing, the power to heal mentally will diminish, until the practitioner’s healing ability is wholly lost. Christian scientific practice begins with Christ’s keynote of harmony, “Be not afraid!”
Said Job: “The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me.”
Naming diseases
My first discovery in the student’s practice was this: If the student silently called the disease by name, when he argued against it, as a general rule the body would respond more quickly, – just as a person replies more readily when his name is spoken; but this was because the student was not perfectly attuned to divine Science, and needed the arguments of truth for reminders. If Spirit or the power of divine Love bear witness to the truth, this is the ultimatum, the scientific way, and the healing is instantaneous.
Evils cast out
It is recorded that once Jesus asked the name of a disease,–a disease which moderns would call dementia. The demon, or evil, replied that his name was Legion. Thereupon Jesus cast out the evil, and the insane man was changed and straightway became whole. The Scripture seems to import that Jesus caused the evil to be self-seen and so destroyed.
Fear as the foundation
The procuring cause and foundation of all sickness is fear, ignorance, or sin. Disease is always induced by a false sense mentally entertained, not destroyed. Disease is an image of thought externalized. The mental state is called a material state. Whatever is cherished in mortal mind as the physical condition is imaged forth on the body.
Unspoken pleading
Always begin your treatment by allaying the fear of patients. Silently reassure them as to their exemption from disease and danger. Watch the result of this simple rule of Christian Science, and you will find that it alleviates the symptoms of every disease. If you succeed in wholly removing the fear, your patient is healed. The great fact that God lovingly governs all, never punishing aught but sin, is your standpoint, from which to advance and destroy the human fear of sickness. Mentally and silently plead the case scientifically for Truth. You may vary the arguments to meet the peculiar or general symptoms of the case you treat, but be thoroughly persuaded in your own mind concerning the truth which you think or speak, and you will be the victor.
Eloquent silence
You may call the disease by name when you mentally deny it; but by naming it audibly, you are liable under some circumstances to impress it upon the thought. The power of Christian Science and divine Love is omnipotent. It is indeed adequate to unclasp the hold and to destroy disease, sin, and death.
Insistence requisite
To prevent disease or to cure it, the power of Truth, of divine Spirit, must break the dream of the material senses. To heal by argument, find the type of the ailment, get its name, and array your mental plea against the physical. Argue at first mentally, not audibly, that the patient has no disease, and conform the argument so as to destroy the evidence of disease. Mentally insist that harmony is the fact, and that sickness is a temporal dream. Realize the presence of health and the fact of harmonious being, until the body corresponds with the normal conditions of health and harmony.
The cure of infants
If the case is that of a young child or an infant, it needs to be met mainly through the parent’s thought, silently or audibly on the aforesaid basis of Christian Science. The Scientist knows that there can be no hereditary disease, since matter is not intelligent and cannot transmit good or evil intelligence to man, and God, the only Mind, does not produce pain in matter. The act of yielding one’s thoughts to the undue contemplation of physical wants or conditions induces those very conditions. A single requirement, beyond what is necessary to meet the simplest needs of the babe is harmful. Mind regulates the condition of the stomach, bowels, and food, the temperature of children and of men, and matter does not. The wise or unwise views of parents and other persons on these subjects produce good or bad effects on the health of children.
Ablutions for cleanliness
The daily ablutions of an infant are no more natural nor necessary than would be the process of taking a fish out of water every day and covering it with dirt in order to make it thrive more vigorously in its own element. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” but washing should be only for the purpose of keeping the body clean, and this can be effected without scrubbing the whole surface daily. Water is not the natural habitat of humanity. I insist on bodily cleanliness within and without. I am not patient with a speck of dirt; but in caring for an infant one need not wash his little body all over each day in order to keep it sweet as the new-blown flower.
Juvenile ailments
Giving drugs to infants, noticing every symptom of flatulency, and constantly directing the mind to such signs,–that mind being laden with illusions about disease, health-laws, and death,–these actions convey mental images to children’s budding thoughts, and often stamp them there, making it probable at any time that such ills may be reproduced in the very ailments feared. A child may have worms, if you say so, or any other malady, timorously held in the beliefs concerning his body. Thus are laid the foundations of the belief in disease and death, and thus are children educated into discord.
Cure of insanity
The treatment of insanity is especially interesting. However obstinate the case, it yields more readily than do most diseases to the salutary action of truth, which counteracts error. The arguments to be used in curing insanity are the same as in other diseases: namely, the impossibility that matter, brain, can control or derange mind, can suffer or cause suffering; also the fact that truth and love will establish a healthy state, guide and govern mortal mind or the thought of the patient, and destroy all error, whether it is called dementia, hatred, or any other discord.
To fix truth steadfastly in your patients’ thoughts, explain Christian Science to them, but not too soon,–not until your patients are prepared for the explanation, lest you array the sick against their own interests by troubling and perplexing their thought. The Christian Scientist’s argument rests on the Christianly scientific basis of being. The Scripture declares, “The Lord He is God [good]; there is none else beside Him.” Even so, harmony is universal, and discord is unreal. Christian Science declares that Mind is substance, also that matter neither feels, suffers, nor enjoys. Hold these points strongly in view. Keep in mind the verity of being,–that man is the image and likeness of God, in whom all being is painless and permanent. Remember that man’s perfection is real and unimpeachable, whereas imperfection is blameworthy, unreal, and is not brought about by divine Love.
Matter is not inflamed
Matter cannot be inflamed. Inflammation is fear, an excited state of mortals which is not normal. Immortal Mind is the only cause; therefore disease is neither a cause nor an effect. Mind in every case is the eternal God, good. Sin, disease, and death have no foundations in Truth. Inflamation as a mortal belief quickens or impedes the action of the system, because thought moves quickly or slowly, leaps or halts when it contemplates unpleasant things, or when the individual looks upon some object which he dreads. Inflammation never appears in a part which mortal thought does not reach. That is why opiates relieve inflammation. They quiet the thought by inducing stupefaction and by resorting to matter instead of to Mind. Opiates do not remove the pain in any scientific sense. They only render mortal mind temporarily less fearful, till it can master an erroneous belief.
Truth calms the thought
Note how thought makes the face pallid. It either retards the circulation or quickens it, causing a pale or flushed cheek. In the same way thought increases or diminishes the secretions, the action of the lungs, of the bowels, and of the heart. The muscles, moving quickly or slowly and impelled or palsied by thought, represent the action of all the organs of the human system, including brain and viscera. To remove the error producing disorder, you must calm and instruct mortal mind with immortal Truth.
Effects of etherization
Etherization will apparently cause the body to disappear. Before the thoughts are fully at rest, the limbs will vanish from consciousness. Indeed, the whole frame will sink from sight along with surrounding objects, leaving the pain standing forth as distinctly as a mountain-peak, as if it were a separate bodily member. At last the agony also vanishes. This process shows the pain to be in the mind, for the inflammation is not suppressed; and the belief of pain will presently return, unless the mental image occasioning the pain be removed by recognizing the truth of being.
Sedatives valueless
A hypodermic injection of morphine is administered to a patient, and in twenty minutes the sufferer is quietly asleep. To him there is no longer any pain. Yet any physician – allopathic, homoeopathic, botanic, eclectic – will tell you that the troublesome material cause is unremoved, and that when the soporific influence of the opium is exhausted, the patient will find himself in the same pain, unless the belief which occasions the pain has meanwhile been changed. Where is the pain while the patient sleeps?
The so-called physical ego
The material body, which you call me, is mortal mind, and this mind is material in sensation, even as the body, which has originated from this material sense and been developed according to it, is material. This materialism of parent and child is only in mortal mind, as the dead body proves; for when the mortal has resigned his body to dust, the body is no longer the parent, even in appearance.
Evil thought depletes
The sick know nothing of the mental process by which they are depleted, and next to nothing of the metaphysical method by which they can be healed. If they ask about their disease, tell them only what is best for them to know. Assure them that they think too much about their ailments, and have already heard too much on that subject. Turn their thoughts away from their bodies to higher objects. Teach them that their being is sustained by
Spirit, not by matter, and that they find health, peace, and harmony in God, divine Love.
Helpful encouragement
Give sick people credit for sometimes knowing more than their doctors. Always support their trust in the power of Mind to sustain the body. Never tell the sick that they have more courage than strength. Tell them rather, that their strength is in proportion to their courage. If you make the sick realize this great truism, there will be no reaction from over-exertion or from excited conditions. Maintain the facts of Christian Science,–that Spirit is God, and therefore cannot be sick; that what is termed matter cannot be sick; that all causation is Mind, acting through spiritual law. Then hold your ground with the unshaken understanding of Truth and Love, and you will win. When you silence the witness against your plea, you destroy the evidence, for the disease disappears. The evidence before the corporeal senses is not the Science of immortal man.
Disease to be made unreal
To the Christian Science healer, sickness is a dream from which the patient needs to be awakened. Disease should not appear real to the physician, since it is demonstrable that the way to cure the patient is to make disease unreal to him. To do this, the physician must understand the unreality of disease in Science.
Explain audibly to your patients, as soon as they can bear it, the complete control which Mind holds over the body. Show them how mortal mind seems to induce disease by certain fears and false conclusions, and how divine Mind can cure by opposite thoughts. Give your patients an underlying understanding to support them and to shield them from the baneful effects of their own conclusions. Show them that the conquest over sickness, as well as over sin, depends on mentally destroying all belief in material pleasure or pain.
Christian pleading
Stick to the truth of being in contradistinction to the error that life, substance, or intelligence can be in matter. Plead with an honest conviction of truth and a clear perception of the unchanging, unerring, and certain effect of divine Science. Then, if your fidelity is half equal to the truth of your plea, you will heal the sick.
Truthful arguments
It must be clear to you that sickness is no more the reality of being than is sin. This mortal dream of sickness, sin, and death should cease through Christian Science. Then one disease would be as readily destroyed as another. Whatever the belief is, if arguments are used to destroy it, the belief must be repudiated, and the negation must extend to the supposed disease and to whatever decides its type and symptoms. Truth is affirmative, and confers harmony. All metaphysical logic is inspired by this simple rule of Truth, which governs all reality. By the truthful arguments you employ, and especially by the spirit of Truth and Love which you entertain, you will heal the sick.
Morality required
Include moral as well as physical belief in your efforts to destroy error. Cast out all manner of evil. “Preach the gospel to every creature.” Speak the truth to every form of error. Tumors, ulcers, tubercles, inflammation, pain, deformed joints, are waking dream-shadows, dark images of mortal thought, which flee before the light of Truth.
A moral question may hinder the recovery of the sick. Lurking error, lust, envy, revenge, malice, or hate will perpetuate or even create the belief in disease. Errors of all sorts tend in this direction. Your true course is to destroy the foe, and leave the field to God, Life, Truth, and Love, remembering that God and His ideas alone are real and harmonious.
Relapse unnecessary
If your patient from any cause suffers a relapse, meet the cause mentally and courageously, knowing that there can be no reaction in Truth. Neither disease itself, sin, nor fear has the power to cause disease or a relapse. Disease has no intelligence with which to move itself about or to change itself from one form to another. If disease moves, mind, not matter, moves it; therefore be sure that you move it off. Meet every adverse circumstance as its master. Observe mind instead of body, lest aught unfit for development enter thought. Think less of material conditions and more of spiritual.
Conquer beliefs and fears
Mind produces all action. If the action proceeds from Truth, from immortal Mind, there is harmony; but mortal mind is liable to any phase of belief. A relapse cannot in reality occur in mortals or so-called mortal minds, for there is but one Mind, one God. Never fear the mental malpractitioner, the mental assassin, who, in attempting to rule mankind, tramples upon the divine Principle of metaphysics, for God is the only power. To succeed in healing, you must conquer your own fears as well as those of your patients, and rise into higher and holier consciousness.
True government of man
If it is found necessary to treat against relapse, know that disease or its symptoms cannot change forms, nor go from one part to another, for Truth destroys disease. There is no metastasis, no stoppage of harmonious action, no paralysis. Truth not error, Love not hate, Spirit not matter, governs man. If students do not readily heal themselves, they should early call an experienced Christian Scientist to aid them. If they are unwilling to do this for themselves, they need only to know that error cannot produce this unnatural reluctance.
Positive reassurance
Instruct the sick that they are not helpless victims, for if they will only accept Truth, they can resist disease and ward it off, as positively as they can the temptation to sin. This fact of Christian Science should be explained to invalids when they are in a fit mood to receive it, – when they will not array themselves against it, but are ready to become receptive to the new idea. The fact that Truth overcomes both disease and sin reassures depressed hope. It imparts a healthy stimulus to the body, and regulates the system. It increases or diminishes the action, as the case may require, better than any drug, alterative, or tonic.
Proper stimulus
Mind is the natural stimulus of the body, but erroneous belief, taken at its best, is not promotive of health or happiness. Tell the sick that they can meet disease fearlessly, if they only realize that divine Love gives them all power over every physical action and condition.
Awaken the patient
If it becomes necessary to startle mortal mind to break its dream of suffering, vehemently tell your patient that he must awake. Turn his gaze from the false evidence of the senses to the harmonious facts of Soul and immortal being. Tell him that he suffers only as the insane suffer, from false beliefs. The only difference is, that insanity implies belief in a diseased brain, while physical ailments (so-called) arise from the belief that other portions of the body are deranged. Derangement, or disarrangement, is a word which conveys the true definition of all human belief in ill-health, or disturbed harmony. Should you thus startle mortal mind in order to remove its beliefs, afterwards make known to the patient your motive for this shock, showing him that it was to facilitate recovery.
How to treat a crisis
If a crisis occurs in your treatment, you must treat the patient less for the disease and more for the mental disturbance or fermentation, and subdue the symptoms by removing the belief that this chemicalization produces pain or disease. Insist vehemently on the great fact which covers the whole ground, that God, Spirit, is all, and that there is none beside Him. There is no disease. When the supposed suffering is gone from mortal mind, there can be no pain; and when the fear is destroyed, the inflammation will subside. Calm the excitement sometimes induced by chemicalization, which is the alterative effect produced by Truth upon error, and sometimes explain the symptoms and their cause to the patient.
No perversion of Mind-science
It is no more Christianly scientific to see disease than it is to experience it. If you would destroy the sense of disease, you should not build it up by wishing to see the forms it assumes or by employing a single material application for its relief. The perversion of Mind-science is like asserting that the products of eight multiplied by five, and of seven by ten, are both forty, and that their combined sum is fifty, and then calling the process mathematics. Wiser than his persecutors, Jesus said: “If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out?”
Effect of this book
If the reader of this book observes a great stir throughout his whole system, and certain moral and physical symptoms seem aggravated, these indications are favorable. Continue to read, and the book will become the physician, allaying the tremor which Truth often brings to error when destroying it.
Disease neutralized
Patients, unfamiliar with the cause of this commotion and ignorant that it is a favorable omen, may be alarmed. If such be the case, explain to them the law of this action. As when an acid and alkali meet and bring out a third quality, so mental and moral chemistry changes the material base of thought, giving more spirituality to consciousness and causing it to depend less on material evidence. These changes which go on in mortal mind serve to reconstruct the body. Thus Christian Science, by the alchemy of Spirit, destroys sin and death.
Bone-healing by surgery
Let us suppose two parallel cases of bone-disease, both similarly produced and attended by the same symptoms. A surgeon is employed in one case, and a Christian Scientist in the other. The surgeon, holding that matter forms its own conditions and renders them fatal at certain points, entertains fears and doubts as to the ultimate outcome of the injury. Not holding the reins of government in his own hands, he believes that something stronger than Mind–namely, matter–governs the case. His treatment is therefore tentative. This mental state invites defeat. The belief that he has met his master in matter and may not be able to mend the bone, increases his fear; yet this belief should not be communicated to the patient, either verbally or otherwise, for this fear greatly diminishes the tendency towards a favorable result. Remember that the unexpressed belief oftentimes affects a sensitive patient more strongly than the expressed thought.
Scientific corrective
The Christian Scientist, understanding scientifically that all is Mind, commences with mental causation, the truth of being, to destroy the error. This corrective is an alterative, reaching to every part of the human system. According to Scripture, it searches “the joints and marrow,” and it restores the harmony of man.
Coping with difficulties
The matter-physician deals with matter as both his foe and his remedy. He regards the ailment as weakened or strengthened according to the evidence which matter presents. The metaphysician, making Mind his basis of operation irrespective of matter and regarding the truth and harmony of being as superior to error and discord, has rendered himself strong, instead of weak, to cope with the case; and he proportionately strengthens his patient with the stimulus of courage and conscious power. Both Science and consciousness are now at work in the economy of being according to the law of Mind, which ultimately asserts its absolute supremacy.
Formation from thought
Ossification or any abnormal condition or derangement of the body is as directly the action of mortal mind as is dementia or insanity. Bones have only the substance of thought which forms them. They are only phenomena of the mind of mortals. The so-called substance of bone is formed first by the parent’s mind, through self-division. Soon the child becomes a separate, individualized mortal mind, which takes possession of itself and its own thoughts of bones.
Accidents unknown to God
Accidents are unknown to God, or immortal Mind, and we must leave the mortal basis of belief and unite with the one Mind, in order to change the notion of chance to the proper sense of God’s unerring direction and thus bring out harmony.
Opposing mentality
Under divine Providence there can be no accidents, since there is no room for imperfection in perfection. In medical practice objections would be raised if one doctor should administer a drug to counteract the working of a remedy prescribed by another doctor. It is equally important in metaphysical practice that the minds which surround your patient should not act against your influence by continually expressing such opinions as may alarm or discourage,–either by giving antagonistic advice or through unspoken thoughts resting on your patient. While it is certain that the divine Mind can remove any obstacle, still you need the ear of your auditor. It is not more difficult to make yourself heard mentally while others are thinking about your patients or conversing with them, if you understand Christian Science–the oneness and the allness of divine Love; but it is well to be alone with God and the sick when treating disease.
Mind removes scrofula
To prevent or to cure scrofula and other so-called hereditary diseases, you must destroy the belief in these ills and the faith in the possibility of their transmission. The patient may tell you that he has a humor in the blood, a scrofulous diathesis. His parents or some of his progenitors farther back have so believed. Mortal mind, not matter, induces this conclusion and its results. You will have humors, just so long as you believe them to be safety-valves or to be ineradicable.
Nothing to consume
If the case to be mentally treated is consumption, take up the leading points included (according to belief) in this disease. Show that it is not inherited; that inflammation, tubercles, hemorrhage, and decomposition are beliefs, images of mortal thought superimposed upon the body; that they are not the truth of man; that they should be treated as error and put out of thought. Then these ills will disappear.
The lungs re-formed
If the body is diseased, this is but one of the beliefs of mortal mind. Mortal man will be less mortal, when he learns that matter never sustained existence and can never destroy God, who is man’s Life. When this is understood, mankind will be more spiritual and know that there is nothing to consume, since Spirit, God, is All-in-all. What if the belief is consumption? God is more to a man than his belief, and the less we acknowledge matter or its laws, the more immortality we possess. Consciousness constructs a better body when faith in matter has been conquered. Correct material belief by spiritual understanding, and Spirit will form you anew. You will never fear again except to offend God, and you will never believe that heart or any portion of the body can destroy you.
Soundness maintained
If you have sound and capacious lungs and want them to remain so, be always ready with the mental protest against the opposite belief in heredity. Discard all notions about lungs, tubercles, in herited consumption, or disease arising from any circumstance, and you will find that mortal mind, when instructed by Truth, yields to divine power, which steers the body into health.
Our footsteps heavenward
The discoverer of Christian Science finds the path less difficult when she has the high goal always before her thoughts, than when she counts her footsteps in endeavoring to reach it. When the destination is desirable, expectation speeds our progress. The struggle for Truth makes one strong instead of weak, resting instead of wearying one. If the belief in death were obliterated, and the understanding obtained that there is no death, this would be a “tree of life,” known by its fruits. Man should renew his energies and endeavors, and see the folly of hypocrisy, while also learning the necessity of working out his own salvation. When it is learned that disease cannot destroy life, and that mortals are not saved from sin or sickness by death, this understanding will quicken into newness of life. It will master either a desire to die or a dread of the grave, and thus destroy the great fear that besets mortal existence.
Christian standard
The relinquishment of all faith in death and also of the fear of its sting would raise the standard of health and morals far beyond its present elevation, and would enable us to hold the banner of Christianity aloft with unflinching faith in God, in Life eternal. Sin brought death, and death will disappear with the disappearance of sin. Man is immortal, and the body cannot die, because matter has no life to surrender. The human concepts named matter, death, disease, sickness, and sin are all that can be destroyed.
Life not contingent on matter
If it is true that man lives, this fact can never change in Science to the opposite belief that man dies. Life is the law of Soul, even the law of the spirit of Truth, and Soul is never without its representative. Man’s individual being can no more die nor disappear in unconsciousness than can Soul, for both are immortal. If man believes in death now, he must disbelieve in it when learning that there is no reality in death, since the truth of being is deathless. The belief that existence is contingent on matter must be met and mastered by Science, before Life can be understood and harmony obtained.
Mortality vanquished
Death is but another phase of the dream that existence can be material. Nothing can interfere with the harmony of being nor end the existence of man in Science. Man is the same after as before a bone is broken or the body guillotined. If man is never to overcome death, why do the Scriptures say, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”? The tenor of the Word shows that we shall obtain the victory over death in proportion as we overcome sin. The great difficulty lies in ignorance of what God is. God, Life, Truth, and Love make man undying. Immortal Mind, governing all, must be acknowledged as supreme in the physical realm, so-called, as well as in the spiritual.
No death nor inaction
Called to the bed of death, what material remedy has man when all such remedies have failed? Spirit is his last resort, but it should have been his first and only resort. The dream of death must be mastered by Mind here or hereafter. Thought will waken from its own material declaration, “I am dead,” to catch this trumpet-word of Truth, “There is no death, no inaction, diseased action, overaction, nor reaction.”
Vision opening
Life is real, and death is the illusion. A demonstration of the facts of Soul in Jesus’ way resolves the dark visions of material sense into harmony and immortality. Man’s privilege at this supreme moment is to prove the words of our Master: “If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.” To divest thought of false trusts and material evidences in order that the spiritual facts of being may appear,–this is the great attainment by means of which we shall sweep away the false and give place to the true. Thus we may establish in truth the temple, or body, “whose builder and maker is God.”
Intelligent consecration
We should consecrate existence, not “to the unknown God” whom we “ignorantly worship,” but to the eternal builder, the everlasting Father, to the Life which mortal sense cannot impair nor mortal belief destroy. We must realize the ability of mental might to offset human misconceptions and to replace them with the life which is spiritual, not material.
The present immortality
The great spiritual fact must be brought out that man is, not shall be, perfect and immortal. We must hold forever the consciousness of existence, and sooner or later, through Christ and Christian Science, we must master sin and death. The evidence of man’s immortality will become more apparent, as material beliefs are given up and the immortal facts of being are admitted.
Careful guidance
The author has healed hopeless organic disease, and raised the dying to life and health through the understanding of God as the only Life. It is a sin to believe that aught can overpower omnipotent and eternal Life, and this Life must be brought to light by the understanding that there is no death, as well as by other graces of Spirit. We must begin, however, with the more simple demonstrations of control, and the sooner we begin the better. The final demonstration takes time for its accomplishment. When walking, we are guided by the eye. We look before our feet, and if we are wise, we look beyond a single step in the line of spiritual advancement.
Clay replying to the potter
The corpse, deserted by thought, is cold and decays, but it never suffers. Science declares that man is subject to Mind. Mortal mind affirms that mind is subordinate to the body, that the body is dying, that it must be buried and decomposed into dust; but mortal mind’s affirmation is not true. Mortals waken from the dream of death with bodies unseen by those who think that they bury the body.
Continuity of existence
If man did not exist before the material organization began, he could not exist after the body is disintegrated. If we live after death and are immortal, we must have lived before birth, for if Life ever had any beginning, it must also have an ending, even according to the calculations of natural science. Do you believe this? No! Do you understand it? No! This is why you doubt the statement and do not demonstrate the facts it involves. We must have faith in all the sayings of our Master, though they are not included in the teachings of the schools, and are not understood generally by our ethical instructors.
Life all-inclusive
Jesus said (John viii. 51), “If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.” That statement is not confined to spiritual life, but includes all the phenomena of existence. Jesus demonstrated this, healing the dying and raising the dead. Mortal mind must part with error, must put off itself with its deeds, and immortal manhood, the Christ ideal, will appear. Faith should enlarge its borders and strengthen its base by resting upon Spirit instead of matter. When man gives up his belief in death, he will advance more rapidly towards God, Life, and Love. Belief in sickness and death, as certainly as belief in sin, tends to shut out the true sense of Life and health. When will mankind wake to this great fact in Science?
I here present to my readers an allegory illustrative of the law of divine Mind and of the supposed laws of matter and hygiene, an allegory in which the plea of Christian Science heals the sick.
A mental court case
Suppose a mental case to be on trial, as cases are tried in court. A man is charged with having committed livercomplaint. The patient feels ill, ruminates, and the trial commences. Personal Sense is the plaintiff. Mortal Man is the defendant. False Belief is the attorney for Personal Sense. Mortal Minds, Materia Medica, Anatomy, Physiology, Hypnotism, Envy, Greed and Ingratitude, constitute the jury. The courtroom is filled with interested spectators, and Judge Medicine is on the bench.
The evidence for the prosecution being called for, a witness testifies thus:
I represent Health-laws. I was present on certain nights when the prisoner, or patient, watched with a sick friend. Although I have the superintendence of human affairs, I was personally abused on those occasions. I was told that
I must remain silent until called for at this trial, when I would be allowed to testify in the case. Notwithstanding my rules to the contrary, the prisoner watched with the sick every night in the week. When the sick mortal was thirsty, the prisoner gave him drink. During all this time the prisoner attended to his daily labors, partaking of food at irregular intervals, sometimes going to sleep immediately after a heavy meal. At last he committed liver-complaint, which I considered criminal, inasmuch as this offence is deemed punishable with death. Therefore I arrested Mortal Man in behalf of the state (namely, the body) and cast him into prison. At the time of the arrest the prisoner summoned Physiology, Materia Medica, and Hypnotism to prevent his punishment. The struggle on their part was long. Materia Medica held out the longest, but at length all these assistants resigned to me, Health-laws, and I succeeded in getting Mortal Man into close confinement until I should release him.
The next witness is called:
I am Coated Tongue. I am covered with a foul fur, placed on me the night of the liver-attack. Morbid Secretion hypnotized the prisoner and took control of his mind, making him despondent. Another witness takes the stand and testifies:
I am Sallow Skin. I have been dry, hot, and chilled by turns since the night of the liver-attack. I have lost my healthy hue and become unsightly, although nothing on my part has occasioned this change. I practise daily ablutions and perform my functions as usual, but I am robbed of my good looks.
The next witness testifies:
I am Nerve, the State Commissioner for Mortal Man. I am intimately acquainted with the plaintiff, Personal Sense, and know him to be truthful and upright, whereas Mortal Man, the prisoner at the bar, is capable of falsehood. I was witness to the crime of liver-complaint. I knew the prisoner would commit it, for I convey messages from my residence in matter, alias brain, to body.
Another witness is called for by the Court of Error and says:
I am Mortality, Governor of the Province of Body, in which Mortal Man resides. In this province there is a statute regarding disease, – namely, that he upon whose person disease is found shall be treated as a criminal and punished with death.
The Judge asks if by doing good to his neighbor, it is possible for man to become diseased, transgress the laws, and merit punishment, and Governor Mortality replies in the affirmative.
Another witness takes the stand and testifies:
I am Death. I was called for, shortly after the report of the crime, by the officer of the Board of Health, who protested that the prisoner had abused him, and that my presence was required to confirm his testimony. One of the prisoner’s friends, Materia Medica, was present when I arrived, endeavoring to assist the prisoner to escape from the hands of justice, alias nature’s so-called law; but my appearance with a message from the Board of Health changed the purpose of Materia Medica, and he decided at once that the prisoner should die.
Judge Medicine charges the jury
The testimony for the plaintiff, Personal Sense, being closed, Judge Medicine arises, and with great solemnity addresses the jury of Mortal Minds. He analyzes the offence, reviews the testimony, and explains the law relating to liver-complaint. His conclusion is, that laws of nature render disease homicidal. In compliance with a stern duty, his Honor, Judge Medicine, urges the jury not to allow their judgment to be warped by the irrational, unchristian suggestions of Christian Science. The jury must regard in such cases only the evidence of Personal Sense against Mortal Man.
As the Judge proceeds, the prisoner grows restless. His sallow face blanches with fear, and a look of despair and death settles upon it. The case is given to the jury. A brief consultation ensues, and the jury returns a verdict of “Guilty of liver-complaint in the first degree.”
Mortal Man sentenced
Judge Medicine then proceeds to pronounce the solemn sentence of death upon the prisoner. Because he has loved his neighbor as himself, Mortal Man has been guilty of benevolence in the first degree, and this has led him into the commission of the second crime, liver-complaint, which material laws condemn as homicide. For this crime Mortal Man is sentenced to be tortured until he is dead. “May God have mercy on your soul,” is the Judge’s solemn peroration.
The prisoner is then remanded to his cell (sick-bed), and Scholastic Theology is sent for to prepare the frightened sense of Life, God,–which sense must be immortal, – for death.
Appeal to a higher tribunal
Ah! but Christ, Truth, the spirit of Life and the friend of Mortal Man, can open wide those prison doors and set the captive free. Swift on the wings of divine Love, there comes a despatch: “Delay the execution; the prisoner is not guilty.” Consternation fills the prison-yard. Some exclaim, “It is contrary to law and justice.” Others say, “The law of Christ supersedes our laws; let us follow Christ.”
Counsel for defence
After much debate and opposition, permission is obtained for a trial in the Court of Spirit, where Christian Science is allowed to appear as counsel for the unfortunate prisoner. Witnesses, judges and jurors, who were at the previous Court of Error, are now summoned to appear before the bar of Justice and eternal Truth.
When the case for Mortal Man versus Personal Sense is opened, Mortal Man’s counsel regards the prisoner with the utmost tenderness. The counsel’s earnest, solemn eyes, kindling with hope and triumph, look upward. Then Christian Science turns suddenly to the supreme tribunal, and opens the argument for the defence:
The prisoner at the bar has been unjustly sentenced. His trial was a tragedy, and is morally illegal. Mortal Man has had no proper counsel in the case. All the testmony has been on the side of Personal Sense, and we shall unearth this foul conspiracy against the liberty and life of Man. The only valid testimony in the case shows the alleged crime never to have been committed. The prisoner is not proved “worthy of death, or of bonds.”
Your Honor, the lower court has sentenced Mortal Man to die, but God made Man immortal and amenable to Spirit only. Denying justice to the body, that court commended man’s immortal Spirit to heavenly mercy,–Spirit which is God Himself and Man’s only lawgiver! Who or what has sinned? Has the body or has Mortal Mind committed a criminal deed? Counsellor False Belief has argued that the body should die, while Reverend Theology would console conscious Mortal Mind, which alone is capable of sin and suffering. The body committed no offence. Mortal Man, in obedience to higher law, helped his fellowman, an act which should result in good to himself as well as to others.
The law of our Supreme Court decrees that whosoever sinneth shall die; but good deeds are immortal, bringing joy instead of grief, pleasure instead of pain, and life instead of death. If liver-complaint was committed by trampling on Laws of Health, this was a good deed, for the agent of those laws is an outlaw, a destroyer of Mortal Man’s liberty and rights. Laws of Health should be sentenced to die. Watching beside the couch of pain in the exercise of a love that “is the fulfilling of the law,”–doing “unto others as ye would that they should do unto you,”–this is no infringement of law, for no demand, human or divine, renders it just to punish a man for acting justly. If mortals sin, our Supreme Judge in equity decides what penalty is due for the sin, and Mortal Man can suffer only for his sin. For naught else can he be punished, according to the law of Spirit, God. Then what jurisdiction had his Honor, Judge Medicine, in this case? To him I might say, in Bible language, “Sittest thou to judge . . . after the law, and commandest . . . to be smitten contrary to the law?” The only jurisdiction to which the prisoner can submit is that of Truth, Life, and Love. If they condemn him not, neither shall Judge Medicine condemn him; and I ask that the prisoner be restored to the liberty of which he has been unjustly deprived.
The principal witness (the officer of the Health-laws) deposed that he was an eye-witness to the good deeds for which Mortal Man is under sentence of death. After betraying him into the hands of your law, the Health-agent disappeared, to reappear however at the trial as a witness against Mortal Man and in the interest of Personal Sense, a murderer. Your Supreme Court must find the prisoner on the night of the alleged offence to have been acting within the limits of the divine law, and in obedience thereto. Upon this statute hangs all the law and testimony. Giving a cup of cold water in Christ’s name, is a Christian service. Laying down his life for a good deed, Mortal Man should find it again. Such acts bear their own justification, and are under the protection of the Most High.
Prior to the night of his arrest, the prisoner summoned two professed friends, Materia Medica and Physiology, to prevent his committing liver-complaint, and thus save him from arrest. But they brought with them Fear, the sheriff, to precipitate the result which they were called to prevent. It was Fear who handcuffed Mortal Man and would now punish him. You have left Mortal Man no alternative. He must obey your law, fear its consequences, and be punished for his fear. His friends struggled hard to rescue the prisoner from the penalty they considered justly due, but they were compelled to let him be taken into custody, tried, and condemned. Thereupon Judge Medicine sat in judgment on the case, and substantially charged the jury, twelve Mortal Minds, to find the prisoner guilty. His Honor sentenced Mortal Man to die for the very deeds which the divine law compels man to commit. Thus the Court of Error construed obedience to the law of divine Love as disobedience to the law of Life. Claiming to protect Mortal Man in right-doing, that court pronounced a sentence of death for doing right.
One of the principal witnesses, Nerve, testified that he was a ruler of Body, in which province Mortal Man resides. He also testified that he was on intimate terms with the plaintiff, and knew Personal Sense to be truthful; that he knew Man, and that Man was made in the image of God, but was a criminal. This is a foul aspersion on man’s Maker. It blots the fair escutcheon of omnipotence. It indicates malice aforethought, a determination to condemn Man in the interest of Personal Sense. At the bar of Truth, in the presence of divine Justice, before the Judge of our higher tribunal, the Supreme Court of Spirit, and before its jurors, the Spiritual Senses, I proclaim this witness, Nerve, to be destitute of intelligence and truth and to be a false witness.
Man self-destroyed; the testimony of matter respected; Spirit not allowed a hearing; Soul a criminal though recommended to mercy; the helpless innocent body tortured,–these are the terrible records of your Court of Error, and I ask that the Supreme Court of Spirit reverse this decision.
Here the opposing counsel, False Belief, called Christian Science to order for contempt of court. Various notables – Materia Medica, Anatomy, Physiology, Scholastic Theology, and Jurisprudence – rose to the question of expelling Christian Science from the bar, for such high-handed illegality. They declared that Christian Science was overthrowing the judicial proceedings of a regularly constituted court. But Judge Justice of the Supreme Court of Spirit overruled their motions on the ground that unjust usages were not allowed at the bar of Truth, which ranks above the lower Court of Error.
The attorney, Christian Science, then read from the supreme statute-book, the Bible, certain extracts on the Rights of Man, remarking, that the Bible was better authority than Blackstone:
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion.
Behold, I give unto you power . . . over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.
Then Christian Science proved the witness, Nerve, to be a perjurer. Instead of being a ruler in the Province of Body, in which Mortal Man was reported to reside, Nerve was an insubordinate citizen, putting in false claims to office and bearing false witness against Man. Turning suddenly to Personal Sense, by this time silent, Christian Science continued:
I ask your arrest in the name of Almighty God on three distinct charges of crime, to wit: perjury, treason, and conspiracy against the rights and life of man.
Then Christian Science continued:
Another witness, equally inadequate, said that on the night of the crime a garment of foul fur was spread over him by Morbid Secretion, while the facts in the case show that this fur is a foreign substance, imported by False Belief, the attorney for Personal Sense, who is in partnership with Error and smuggles Error’s goods into market without the inspection of Soul’s government officers. When the Court of Truth summoned Furred Tongue for examination, he disappeared and was never heard of more.
Morbid Secretion is not an importer or dealer in fur, but we have heard Materia Medica explain how this fur is manufactured, and we know Morbid Secretion to be on friendly terms with the firm of Personal Sense, Error, & Co., receiving pay from them and introducing their goods into the market. Also, be it known that False Belief, the counsel for the plaintiff, Personal Sense, is a buyer for this firm. He manufactures for it, keeps a furnishing store, and advertises largely for his employers.
Death testified that he was absent from the Province of Body, when a message came from False Belief, commanding him to take part in the homicide. At this request Death repaired to the spot where the liver-complaint was in process, frightening away Materia Medica, who was then manacling the prisoner in the attempt to save him. True, Materia Medica was a misguided participant in the misdeed for which the Health-officer had Mortal Man in custody, though Mortal Man was innocent.
Christian Science turned from the abashed witnesses, his words flashing as lightning in the perturbed faces of these worthies, Scholastic Theology, Materia Medica, Physiology, the blind Hypnotism, and the masked Personal Sense, and said:
God will smite you, O whited walls, for injuring in your ignorance the unfortunate Mortal Man who sought your aid in his struggles against liver-complaint and Death. You came to his rescue, only to fasten upon him an offence of which he was innocent. You aided and abetted Fear and Health-laws. You betrayed Mortal Man, meanwhile declaring Disease to be God’s servant and the righteous executor of His laws. Our higher statutes declare you all, witnesses, jurors, and judges, to be offenders, awaiting the sentence which General Progress and Divine Love will pronounce. We send our best detectives to whatever locality is reported to be haunted by Disease, but on visiting the spot, they learn that Disease was never there, for he could not possibly elude their search. Your Material Court of Errors, when it condemned Mortal Man on the ground of hygienic disobedience, was manipulated by the oleaginous machinations of the counsel, False Belief, whom Truth arraigns before the supreme bar of Spirit to answer for his crime. Morbid Secretion is taught how to make sleep befool reason before sacrificing mortals to their false gods.
Mortal Minds were deceived by your attorney, False Belief, and were influenced to give a verdict delivering Mortal Man to Death. Good deeds are transformed into crimes, to which you attach penalties; but no warping of justice can render disobedience to the so-called laws of Matter disobedience to God, or an act of homicide. Even penal law holds homicide, under stress of circumstances, to be justifiable. Now what greater justification can any deed have, than that it is for the good of one’s neighbor? Wherefore, then, in the name of outraged justice, do you sentence Mortal Man for ministering to the wants of his fellow-man in obedience to divine law? You cannot trample upon the decree of the Supreme Bench. Mortal Man has his appeal to Spirit, God, who sentences only for sin.
The false and unjust beliefs of your human mental legislators compel them to enact wicked laws of sickness and so forth, and then render obedience to these laws punishable as crime. In the presence of the Supreme Lawgiver, standing at the bar of Truth, and in accordance with the divine statutes, I repudiate the false testimony of Personal. Sense. I ask that he be forbidden to enter against Mortal Man any more suits to be tried at the Court of Material Error. I appeal to the just and equitable decisions of divine Spirit to restore to Mortal Man the rights of which he has been deprived.
Charge of the Chief Justice
Here the counsel for the defence closed, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, with benign and imposing presence, comprehending and defining all law and evidence, explained from his statute-book, the Bible, that any so-called law, which undertakes to punish aught but sin, is null and void.
He also decided that the plaintiff, Personal Sense, be not permitted to enter any suits at the bar of Soul, but be enjoined to keep perpetual silence, and in case of temptation, to give heavy bonds for good behavior. He concluded his charge thus:–
The plea of False Belief we deem unworthy of a hearing. Let what False Belief utters, now and forever, fall into oblivion, “unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.” According to our statute, Material Law is a liar who cannot bear witness against Mortal Man, neither can Fear arrest Mortal Man nor can Disease cast him into prison. Our law refuses to recognize Man as sick or dying, but holds him to be forever in the image and likeness of his Maker. Reversing the testimony of Personal Sense and the decrees of the Court of Error in favor of Matter, Spirit decides in favor of Man and against Matter. We further recommend that Materia Medica adopt Christian Science and that Health-laws, Mesmerism, Hypnotism, Oriental Witchcraft, and Esoteric Magic be publicly executed at the hands of our sheriff, Progress. The Supreme Bench decides in favor of intelligence, that no law outside of divine Mind can punish or reward Mortal Man. Your personal jurors in the Court of Error are myths. Your attorney, False Belief, is an impostor, persuading Mortal Minds to return a verdict contrary to law and gospel. The plaintiff, Personal Sense, is recorded in our Book of books as a liar. Our great Teacher of mental jurisprudence speaks of him also as “a murderer from the beginning.” We have no trials for sickness before the tribunal of divine Spirit. There, Man is adjudged innocent of transgressing physical laws, because there are no such laws. Our statute is spiritual, our Government is divine. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
Divine verdict
The Jury of Spiritual Senses agreed at once upon a verdict, and there resounded throughout the vast audiencechamber of Spirit the cry, Not guilty. Then the prisoner rose up regenerated, strong, free. We noticed, as he shook hands with his counsel, Christian Science, that all sallowness and debility had disappeared. His form was erect and commanding, his countenance beaming with health and happiness. Divine Love had cast out fear. Mortal Man, no longer sick and in prison, walked forth, his feet “beautiful upon the mountains,” as of one “that bringeth good tidings.”
Christ the great physician
Neither animal magnetism nor hypnotism enters into the practice of Christian Science, in which truth cannot be reversed, but the reverse of error is true. An improved belief cannot retrograde. When Christ changes a belief of sin or of sickness into a better belief, then belief melts into spiritual understanding, and sin, disease, and death disappear. Christ, Truth, gives mortals temporary food and clothing until the material, transformed with the ideal, disappears, and man is clothed and fed spiritually. St. Paul says, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling:” Jesus said, “Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” This truth is Christian Science.
Christian Scientists, be a law to yourselves that mental malpractice cannot harm you either when asleep or when awake.
Chapter XIII – Teaching Christian Science
Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser: teach a just man, and he will increase in learning.–PROVERBS.
Study of medicine
WHEN the discoverer of Christian Science is consulted by her followers as to the propriety, advantage, and consistency of systematic medical study, she tries to show them that under ordinary circumstances a resort to faith in corporeal means tends to deter those, who make such a compromise, from entire confidence in omnipotent Mind as really possessing all power. While a course of medical study is at times severely condemned by some Scientists, she feels, as she always has felt, that all are privileged to work out their own salvation according to their light, and that our motto should be the Master’s counsel, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
Failure’s lessons
If patients fail to experience the healing power of Christian Science, and think they can be benefited by certain ordinary physical methods of medical treatment, then the Mind-physician should give up such cases, and leave invalids free to resort to whatever other systems they fancy will afford relief. Thus such invalids may learn the value of the apostolic precept: “Reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.” If the sick find these material expedients unsatisfactory, and they receive no help from them, these very failures may open their blind eyes. In some way, sooner or later, all must rise superior to materiality, and suffering is oft the divine agent in this elevation. “All things work together for good to them that love God,” is the dictum of Scripture.
Refuge and strength
If Christian Scientists ever fail to receive aid from other Scientists,–their brethren upon whom they may call,–God will still guide them into the right use of temporary and eternal means. Step by step will those who trust Him find that “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”
Charity to those opposed
Students are advised by the author to be charitable and kind, not only towards differing forms of religion and medicine, but to those who hold these differing opinions. Let us be faithful in pointing the way through Christ, as we understand it, but let us also be careful always to “judge righteous judgment,” and never to condemn rashly. “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” That is, Fear not that he will smite thee again for thy forbearance. If ecclesiastical sects or medical schools turn a deaf ear to the teachings of Christian Science, then part from these opponents as did Abraham when he parted from Lot, and say in thy heart: “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between My herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren.” Immortals, or God’s children in divine Science, are one harmonious family; but mortals, or the “children of men” in material sense, are discordant and ofttimes false brethren.
Conforming to explicit rules
The teacher must make clear to students the Science of healing, especially its ethics,–that all is Mind, and that the Scientist must conform to God’s requirements. Also the teacher must thoroughly fit his students to defend themselves against sin, and to guard against the attacks of the would-be mental assassin, who attempts to kill morally and physically. No hypothesis as to the existence of another power should interpose a doubt or fear to hinder the demonstration of Christian Science. Unfold the latent energies and capacities for good in your pupil. Teach the great possibilities of man endued with divine Science. Teach the dangerous possibility of dwarfing the spiritual understanding and demonstration of Truth by sin, or by recourse to material means for healing. Teach the meekness and might of life “hid with Christ in God,” and there will be no desire for other healing methods. You render the divine law of healing obscure and void, when you weigh the human in the scale with the divine, or limit in any direction of thought the omnipresence and omnipotence of God.
Divine energy
Christian Science silences human will, quiets fear with Truth and Love, and illustrates the unlabored motion of the divine energy in healing the sick. Self- seeking, envy, passion, pride, hatred, and revenge are cast out by the divine Mind which heals disease. The human will which maketh and worketh a lie, hiding the divine Principle of harmony, is destructive to health, and is the cause of disease rather than its cure.
Blight of avarice
There is great danger in teaching Mind-healing indiscriminately, thus disregarding the morals of the student and caring only for the fees. Recalling Jefferson’s words about slavery, “I tremble, when I remember that God is just,” the author trembles whenever she sees a man, for the petty consideration of money, teaching his slight knowledge of Mind-power, – perhaps communicating his own bad morals, and in this way dealing pitilessly with a community unprepared for selfdefence.
A thorough perusal of the author’s publications heals sickness. If patients sometimes seem worse while reading this book, the change may either arise from the alarm of the physician, or it may mark the crisis of the disease. Perseverance in the perusal of the book has generally completely healed such cases.
Exclusion of malpractice
Whoever practises the Science the author teaches, through which Mind pours light and healing upon this generation, can practise on no one from sinister or malicious motives without destroying his own power to heal and his own health. Good must dominate in the thoughts of the healer, or his demonstration is protracted, dangerous, and impossible in Science. A wrong motive involves defeat. In the Science of Mind-healing, it is imperative to be honest, for victory rests on the side of immutable right. To understand God strengthens hope, enthrones faith in Truth, and verifies Jesus’ word: “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”
Iniquity overcome
Resisting evil, you overcome it and prove its nothingness. Not human platitudes, but divine beatitudes, reflect the spiritual light and might which heal the sick. The exercise of will brings on a hypnotic state, detrimental to health and integrity of thought. This must therefore be watched and guarded against. Covering iniquity will prevent prosperity and the ultimate triumph of any cause. Ignorance of the error to be eradicated oftentimes subjects you to its abuse.
No trespass on human rights
The heavenly law is broken by trespassing upon man’s individual right of self-government. We have no authority in Christian Science and no moral right to attempt to influence the thoughts of others, except it be to benefit them. In mental practice you must not forget that erring human opinions, conflicting selfish motives, and ignorant attempts to do good may render you incapable of knowing or judging accurately the need of your fellow-men. Therefore the rule is, heal the sick when called upon for aid, and save the victims of the mental assassins.
Expose sin without believing in it
Ignorance, subtlety, or false charity does not forever conceal error; evil will in time disclose and punish itself. The recuperative action of the system, when mentally sustained by Truth, goes on naturally. When sin or sickness the reverse of harmony–seems true to material sense, impart without frightening or discouraging the patient the truth and spiritual understanding, which destroy disease. Expose and denounce the claims of evil and disease in all their forms, but realize no reality in them. A sinner is not reformed merely by assuring him that he cannot be a sinner because there is no sin. To put down the claim of sin, you must detect it, remove the mask, point out the illusion, and thus get the victory over sin and so prove its unreality. The sick are not healed merely by declaring there is no sickness, but by knowing that there is none.
Wicked evasions
A sinner is afraid to cast the first stone. He may say, as a subterfuge, that evil is unreal, but to know it, he must demonstrate his statement. To assume that there are no claims of evil and yet to indulge them, is a moral offence. Blindness and self-righteousness cling fast to iniquity. When the Publican’s wail went out to the great heart of Love, it won his humble desire. Evil which obtains in the bodily senses, but which the heart condemns, has no foundation; but if evil is uncondemned, it is undenied and nurtured. Under such circumstances, to say that there is no evil, is an evil in itself. When needed tell the truth concerning the lie. Evasion of Truth cripples integrity, and casts thee down from the pinnacle.
Truth’s grand results
Christian Science rises above the evidence of the corporeal senses; but if you have not risen above sin yourself, do not congratulate yourself upon your blindness to evil or upon the good you know and do not. A dishonest position is far from Christianly scientific. “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.” Try to leave on every student’s mind the strong impress of divine Science, a high sense of the moral and spiritual qualifications requisite for healing, well knowing it to be impossible for error, evil, and hate to accomplish the grand results of Truth and Love. The reception or pursuit of instructions opposite to absolute Christian Science must always hinder scientific demonstration.
Adherence to righteousness
If the student adheres strictly to the teachings of Christian Science and ventures not to break its rules, he cannot fail of success in healing. It is Christian Science to do right, and nothing short of rightdoing has any claim to the name. To talk the right and live the wrong is foolish deceit, doing one’s self the most harm. Fettered by sin yourself, it is difficult to free another from the fetters of disease. With your own wrists manacled, it is hard to break another’s chains. A little leaven causes the whole mass to ferment. A grain of Christian Science does wonders for mortals, so omnipotent is Truth, but more of Christian Science must be gained in order to continue in well doing.
Right adjusts the balance
The wrong done another reacts most heavily against one’s self. Right adjusts the balance sooner or later. Think it “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” than for you to benefit yourself by injuring others. Man’s moral mercury, rising or falling, registers his healing ability and fitness to teach. You should practise well what you know, and you will then advance in proportion to your honesty and fidelity,–qualities which insure success in this Science; but it requires a higher understanding to teach this subject properly and correctly than it does to heal the most difficult case.
Inoculation of thought
The baneful effect of evil associates is less seen than felt. The inoculation of evil human thoughts ought to be understood and guarded against. The first impression, made on a mind which is attracted or repelled according to personal merit or demerit, is a good detective of individual character. Certain minds meet only to separate through simultaneous repulsion. They are enemies without the preliminary offence. The impure are at peace with the impure. Only virtue is a rebuke to vice. A proper teacher of Christian Science improves the health and the morals of his student if the student practises what he is taught, and unless this result follows, the teacher is a Scientist only in name.
Three classes of neophytes
There is a large class of thinkers whose bigotry and conceit twist every fact to suit themselves. Their creed teaches belief in a mysterious, supernatural God, and in a natural, all-powerful devil. Another class, still more unfortunate, are so depraved that they appear to be innocent. They utter a falsehood, while looking you blandly in the face, and they never fail to stab their benefactor in the back. A third class of thinkers build with solid masonry. They are sincere, generous, noble, and are therefore open to the approach and recognition of Truth. To teach Christian Science to such as these is no task. They do not incline longingly to error, whine over the demands of Truth, nor play the traitor for place and power.
Touchstone of Science
Some people yield slowly to the touch of Truth. Few yield without a struggle, and many are reluctant to acknowledge that they have yielded; but unless this admission is made, evil will boast itself above good. The Christian Scientist has enlisted to lessen evil, disease, and death; and he will overcome them by understanding their nothingness and the allness of God, or good. Sickness to him is no less a temptation than is sin, and he heals them both by understanding God’s power over them. The Christian Scientist knows that they are errors of belief, which Truth can and will destroy.
False claims annihilated
Who, that has felt the perilous beliefs in life, substance, and intelligence separated from God, can say that there is no error of belief? Knowing the claim of animal magnetism, that all evil combines in the belief of life, substance, and intelligence in matter, electricity, animal nature, and organic life, who will deny that these are the errors which Truth must and will annihilate? Christian Scientists must live under the constant pressure of the apostolic command to come out from the material world and be separate. They must renounce aggression, oppression and the pride of power. Christianity, with the crown of Love upon her brow, must be their queen of life.
Treasure in heaven
Students of Christian Science, who start with its letter and think to succeed without the spirit, will either make shipwreck of their faith or be turned sadly awry. They must not only seek, but strive, to enter the narrow path of Life, for “wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.” Man walks in the direction towards which he looks, and where his treasure is, there will his heart be also. If our hopes and affections are spiritual, they come from above, not from beneath, and they bear as of old the fruits of the Spirit.
Obligations of teachers
Every Christian Scientist, every conscientious teacher of the Science of Mind-healing, knows that human will is not Christian Science, and he must recognize this in order to defend himself from the influence of human will. He feels morally obligated to open the eyes of his students that they may perceive the nature and methods of error of every sort, especially any subtle degree of evil, deceived and deceiving. All mental malpractice arises from ignorance or malice aforethought. It is the injurious action of one mortal mind controlling another from wrong motives, and it is practised either with a mistaken or a wicked purpose.
Indispensable defence
Show your student that mental malpractice tends to blast moral sense, health, and the human life. Instruct him how to bar the door of his thought against this seeming power, – a task not difficult, when one understands that evil has in reality no power. Incorrect reasoning leads to practical error. The wrong thought should be arrested before it has a chance to manifest itself.
Egotistic darkness
Walking in the light, we are accustomed to the light and require it; we cannot see in darkness. But eyes accustomed to darkness are pained by the light. When outgrowing the old, you should not fear to put on the new. Your advancing course may provoke envy, but it will also attract respect. When error confronts you, withhold not the rebuke or the explanation which destroys error. Never breathe an immoral atmosphere, unless in the attempt to purify it. Better is the frugal intellectual repast with contentment and virtue, than the luxury of learning with egotism and vice.
Unwarranted expectations
Right is radical. The teacher must know the truth himself. He must live it and love it, or he cannot impart it to others. We soil our garments with conservatism, and afterwards we must wash them clean. When the spiritual sense of Truth unfolds its harmonies, you take no risks in the policy of error. Expect to heal simply by repeating the author’s words, by right talking and wrong acting, and you will be disappointed. Such a practice does not demonstrate the Science by which divine Mind heals the sick.
Reliable authority
Acting from sinful motives destroys your power of healing from the right motive. On the other hand, if you had the inclination or power to practise wrongly and then should adopt Christian Science, the wrong power would be destroyed. You do not deny the mathematician’s right to distinguish the correct from the incorrect among the examples on the blackboard, nor disbelieve the musician when he distinguishes concord from discord. In like manner it should be granted that the author understands what she is saying.
Winning the field
Right and wrong, truth and error, will be at strife in the minds of students, until victory rests on the side of invincible truth. Mental chemicalization follows the explanation of Truth, and a higher basis is thus won; but with some individuals the morbid moral or physical symptoms constantly reappear. I have never witnessed so decided effects from the use of material remedies as from the use of spiritual.
Knowledge and honesty
Teach your student that he must know himself before he can know others and minister to human needs. Honesty is spiritual power. Dishonesty is human weakness, which forfeits divine help. You uncover sin, not in order to injure, but in order to bless the corporeal man; and a right motive has its reward. Hidden sin is spiritual wickedness in high places. The masquerader in this Science thanks God that there is no evil, yet serves evil in the name of good.
Metaphysical treatment
You should treat sickness mentally just as you would sin, except that you must not tell the patient that he is sick nor give names to diseases, for such a course increases fear, the foundation of disease, and impresses more deeply the wrong mind-picture. A Christian Scientist’s medicine is Mind, the divine Truth that makes man free. A Christian Scientist never recommends material hygiene, never manipulates. He does not trespass on the rights of mind nor can he practice animal magnetism or hypnotism. It need not be added that the use of tobacco or intoxicating drinks is not in harmony with Christian Science.
Impotence of hate
Teach your students the omnipotence of Truth, which illustrates the impotence of error. The understanding, even in a degree, of the divine All-power destroys fear, and plants the feet in the true path, – the path which leads to the house built without hands “eternal in the heavens.” Human hate has no legitimate mandate and no kingdom. Love is enthroned. That evil or matter has neither intelligence nor power, is the doctrine of absolute Christian Science, and this is the great truth which strips all disguise from error.
Love the incentive
He, who understands in sufficient degree the Principle of Mind-healing, points out to his student error as well as truth, the wrong as well as the right practice. Love for God and man is the true incentive in both healing and teaching. Love inspires, illumines, designates, and leads the way. Right motives give pinions to thought, and strength and freedom to speech and action. Love is priestess at the altar of Truth. Wait patiently for divine Love to move upon the waters of mortal mind, and form the perfect concept. Patience must “have her perfect work.”
Continuity of interest
Do not dismiss students at the close of a class term, feeling that you have no more to do for them. Let your loving care and counsel support all their feeble footsteps, until your students tread firmly in the straight and narrow way. The superiority of spiritual power over sensuous is the central point of Christian Science. Remember that the letter and mental argument are only human auxiliaries to aid in bringing thought into accord with the spirit of Truth and Love, which heals the sick and the sinner.
Weakness and guilt
A mental state of self-condemnation and guilt or a faltering and doubting trust in Truth are unsuitable conditions for healing the sick. Such mental states indicate weakness instead of strength. Hence the necessity of being right yourself in order to teach this Science of healing. You must utilize the moral might of Mind in order to walk over the waves of error and support your claims by demonstration. If you are yourself lost in the belief and fear of disease or sin, and if, knowing the remedy, you fail to use the energies of Mind in your own behalf, you can exercise little or no power for others’ help. “First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
The trust of the All-wise
The student, who receives his knowledge of Christian Science, or metaphysical healing, from a human teacher, may be mistaken in judgment and demonstration, but God cannot mistake. God selects for the highest service one who has grown into such a fitness for it as renders any abuse of the mission an impossibility. The All-wise does not bestow His highest trusts upon the unworthy. When He commissions a messenger, it is one who is spiritually near Himself. No person can misuse this mental power, if he is taught of God to discern it.
Integrity assured
This strong point in Christian Science is not to be overlooked,–that the same fountain cannot send forth both sweet waters and bitter. The higher your attainment in the Science of mental healing and teaching, the more impossible it will be come for you intentionally to influence mankind adverse to its highest hope and achievement.
Chicanery impossible
Teaching or practising in the name of Truth, but contrary to its spirit or rules, is most dangerous quackery. Strict adherence to the divine Principle and rules of the scientific method has secured the only success of the students of Christian Science. This alone entitles them to the high standing which most of them hold in the community, a reputation experimentally justified by their efforts. Whoever affirms that there is more than one Principle and method of demonstrating Christian Science greatly errs, ignorantly or intentionally, and separates himself from the true conception of Christian Science healing and from its possible demonstration.
No dishonest concessions
Any dishonesty in your theory and practice betrays a gross ignorance of the method of the Christ-cure. Science makes no concessions to persons or opinions. One must abide in the morale of truth or he cannot demonstrate the divine Principle. So long as matter is the basis of practice, illness cannot be efficaciously treated by the metaphysical process. Truth does the work, and you must both understand and abide by the divine Principle of your demonstration.
This volume indispensable
A Christian Scientist requires my work SCIENCE AND HEALTH for his textbook, and so do all his students and patients. Why? First: Because it is the voice of Truth to this age, and contains the full statement of Christian Science, or the Science of healing through Mind. Second: Because it was the first book known, containing a thorough statement of Christian Science. Hence it gave the first rules for demonstrating this Science, and registered the revealed Truth uncontaminated by human hypotheses. Other works, which have borrowed from this book without giving it credit, have adulterated the Science. Third: Because this book has done more for teacher and student, for healer and patient, than has been accomplished by other books.
Purity of science
Since the divine light of Christian Science first dawned upon the author, she has never used this newly discovered power in any direction which she fears to have fairly understood. Her prime object, since entering this field of labor, has been to prevent suffering, not to produce it. That we cannot scientifically both cure and cause disease is self-evident. In the legend of the shield, which led to a quarrel between two knights because each of them could see but one face of it, both sides were beautiful according to their degree; but to mental malpractice, prolific of evil, there is no good aspect, either silvern or golden.
Backsliders and mistakes
Christian Science is not an exception to the general rule, that there is no excellence without labor in a direct line. One cannot scatter his fire, and at the same time hit the mark. To pursue other vocations and advance rapidly in the demonstration of this Science, is not possible. Departing from Christian Science, some learners commend diet and hygiene. They even practise these, intending thereby to initiate the cure which they mean to complete with Mind, as if the non-intelligent could aid Mind! The Scientist’s demonstration rests on one Principle, and there must and can be no opposite rule. Let this Principle be applied to the cure of disease without exploiting other means.
Mental charlatanism
Mental quackery rests on the same platform as all other quackery. The chief plank in this platform is the doctrine that Science has two principles in partnership, one good and the other evil, one spiritual, the other material,–and that these two may be simultaneously at work on the sick. This theory is supposed to favor practice from both a mental and a material standpoint. Another plank in the platform is this, that error will finally have the same effect as truth.
Divinity ever ready
It is anything but scientifically Christian to think of aiding the divine Principle of healing or of trying to sustain the human body until the divine Mind is ready to take the case. Divinity is always ready. Semper paratus is Truth’s motto. Having seen so much suffering from quackery, the author desires to keep it out of Christian Science. The two-edged sword of Truth must turn in every direction to guard “the tree of life.”
The panoply of wisdom
Sin makes deadly thrusts at the Christian Scientist as ritualism and creed are summoned to give place to higher law, but Science will ameliorate mortal malice. The Christianly scientific man reflects the divine law, thus becoming a law unto himself. He does violence to no man. Neither is he a false accuser. The Christian Scientist wisely shapes his course, and is honest and consistent in following the leadings of divine Mind. He must prove, through living as well as healing and teaching, that Christ’s way is the only one by which mortals are radically saved from sin and sickness.
Advancement by sacrifice
Christianity causes men to turn naturally from matter to Spirit, as the flower turns from darkness to light. Man then appropriates those things which “eye hath not seen nor ear heard.” Paul and John had a clear apprehension that, as mortal man achieves no worldly honors except by sacrifice, so he must gain heavenly riches by forsaking all worldliness. Then he will have nothing in common with the worldling’s affections, motives, and aims. Judge not the future advancement of Christian Science by the steps already taken, lest you yourself be condemned for failing to take the first step.
Dangerous knowledge
Any attempt to heal mortals with erring mortal mind, instead of resting on the omnipotence of the divine Mind, must prove abortive. Committing the bare process of mental healing to frail mortals, untaught and unrestrained by Christian Science, is like putting a sharp knife into the hands of a blind man or a raging maniac, and turning him loose in the crowded streets of a city. Whether animated by malice or ignorance, a false practitioner will work mischief, and ignorance is more harmful than wilful wickedness, when the latter is distrusted and thwarted in its incipiency.
Certainty of results
To mortal sense Christian Science seems abstract, but the process is simple and the results are sure if the Science is understood. The tree must be good, which produces good fruit. Guided by divine Truth and not guesswork, the theologus (that is, the student the Christian and scientific expounder–of the divine law) treats disease with more certain results than any other healer on the globe. The Christian Scientist should understand and adhere strictly to the rules of divine metaphysics as laid down in this work, and rest his demonstration on this sure basis.
Ontology defined
Ontology is defined as “the science of the necessary constituents and relations of all beings,” and it underlies all metaphysical practice. Our system of Mind-healing rests on the apprehension of the nature and essence of all being,–on the divine Mind and Love’s essential qualities. Its pharmacy is moral, and its medicine is intellectual and spiritual, though used for physical healing. Yet this most fundamental part of metaphysics is the one most difficult to understand and demonstrate, for to the material thought all is material, till such thought is rectified by Spirit.
Mischievous imagination
Sickness is neither imaginary nor unreal,–that is, to the frightened, false sense of the patient. Sickness is more than fancy; it is solid conviction. It is therefore to be dealt with through right apprehension of the truth of being. If Christian healing is abused by mere smatterers in Science, it becomes a tedious mischief-maker. Instead of scientifically effecting a cure, it starts a petty crossfire over every cripple and invalid, buffeting them with the superficial and cold assertion, “Nothing ails you.”
Author’s early instructions
When the Science of Mind was a fresh revelation to the author, she had to impart, while teaching its grand facts, the hue of spiritual ideas from her own spiritual condition, and she had to do this orally through the meagre channel afforded by language and by her manuscript circulated among the students. As former beliefs were gradually expelled from her thought, the teaching became clearer, until finally the shadow of old errors was no longer cast upon divine Science.
Proof by induction
I do not maintain that anyone can exist in the flesh without food and raiment; but I do believe that the real man is immortal and that he lives in Spirit, not matter. Christian Science must be accepted at this period by induction. We admit the whole, because a part is proved and that part illustrates and proves the entire Principle. Christian Science can be taught only by those who are morally advanced and spiritually endowed, for it is not superficial, nor is it discerned from the standpoint of the human senses. Only by the illumination of the spiritual sense, can the light of understanding be thrown upon this Science, because Science reverses the evidence before the material senses and furnishes the eternal interpretation of God and man.
If you believe that you are sick, should you say, ” I am sick”? No, but you should tell your belief sometimes, if this be requisite to protect others. If you commit a crime, should you acknowledge to yourself that you are a criminal? Yes. Your responses should differ because of the different effects they produce. Usually to admit that you are sick, renders your case less curable, while to recognize your sin, aids in destroying it. Both sin and sickness are error, and Truth is their remedy. The truth regarding error is, that error is not true, hence it is unreal. To prove scientifically the error or unreality of sin, you must first see the claim of sin, and then destroy it. Whereas, to prove scientifically the error or unreality of disease, you must mentally unsee the disease; then you will not feel it, and it is destroyed.
Rapidity of assimilation
Systematic teaching and the student’s spiritual growth and experience in practice are requisite for a thorough comprehension of Christian Science. Some individuals assimilate truth more readily than others, but any student, who adheres to the divine rules of Christian Science and imbibes the spirit of Christ, can demonstrate Christian Science, cast out error, heal the sick, and add continually to his store of spiritual understanding, potency, enlightenment, and success.
Divided loyalty
If the student goes away to practise Truth’s teachings only in part, dividing his interests between God and mammon and substituting his own views for Truth, he will inevitably reap the error he sows. Whoever would demonstrate the healing of Christian Science must abide strictly by its rules, heed every statement, and advance from the rudiments laid down. There is nothing difficult nor toilsome in this task, when the way is pointed out; but self-denial, sincerity, Christianity, and persistence alone win the prize, as they usually do in every department of life.
Anatomy defined
Anatomy, when conceived of spiritually, is mental selfknowledge, and consists in the dissection of thoughts to discover their quality, quantity, and origin. Are thoughts divine or human? That is the important question. This branch of study is indispensable to the excision of error. The anatomy of Christian Science teaches when and how to probe the self-inflicted wounds of selfishness, malice, envy, and hate. It teaches the control of mad ambition. It unfolds the hallowed influences of unselfishness, philanthropy, spiritual love. It urges the government of the body both in health and in sickness. The Christian Scientist, through understanding mental anatomy, discerns and deals with the real cause of disease. The material physician gropes among phenomena, which fluctuate every instant under influences not embraced in his diagnosis, and so he may stumble and fall in the darkness.
Scientific obstetrics
Teacher and student should also be familiar with the obstetrics taught by this Science. To attend properly the birth of the new child, or divine idea, you should so detach mortal thought from its material conceptions, that the birth will be natural and safe. Though gathering new energy, this idea cannot injure its useful surroundings in the travail of spiritual birth. A spiritual idea has not a single element of error, and this truth removes properly whatever is offensive. The new idea, conceived and born of Truth and Love, is clad in white garments. Its beginning will be meek, its growth sturdy, and its maturity undecaying. When this new birth takes place, the Christian Science infant is born of the Spirit, born of God, and can cause the mother no more suffering. By this we know that Truth is here and has fulfilled its perfect work.
Unhesitating decision
To decide quickly as to the proper treatment of error whether error is manifested in forms of sickness, sin, or death – is the first step towards destroying error. Our Master treated error through Mind. He never enjoined obedience to the laws of nature, if by these are meant laws of matter, nor did he use drugs. There is a law of God applicable to healing, and it is a spiritual law instead of material. The sick are not healed by inanimate matter or drugs, as they believe that they are. Such seeming medical effect or action is that of socalled mortal mind.
Seclusion of the author
It has been said to the author, “The world is benefited by you, but it feels your influence without seeing you. Why do you not make yourself more widely known?” Could her friends know how little time the author has had, in which to make herself outwardly known except through her laborious publications, – and how much time and toil are still required to establish the stately operations of Christian Science,–they would understand why she is so secluded. Others could not take her place, even if willing so to do. She therefore remains unseen at her post, seeking no selfaggrandizement but praying, watching, and working for the redemption of mankind.
If from an injury or from any cause, a Christian Scientist were seized with pain so violent that he could not treat himself mentally,–and the Scientists had failed to relieve him,–the sufferer could call a surgeon, who would give him a hypodermic injection, then, when the belief of pain was lulled, he could handle his own case mentally. Thus it is that we “prove all things; [and] hold fast that which is good.”
The right motive and its reward
In founding a pathological system of Christianity, the author has labored to expound divine Principle, and not to exalt personality. The weapons of bigotry, ignorance, envy, fall before an honest heart. Adulterating Christian Science, makes it void. Falsity has no foundation. “The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep.” Neither dishonesty nor ignorance ever founded, nor can they overthrow a scientific system of ethics.
Chapter XIV – Recapitulation
For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.–ISAIAH.
THIS chapter is from the first edition of the author’s class-book, copyrighted in 1870. After much labor and increased spiritual understanding, she revised that treatise for this volume in 1875. Absolute Christian Science pervades its statements, to elucidate scientific metaphysics.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Question.–What is God? Answer.–God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love.
Question.–Are these terms synonymous? Answer.–They are. They refer to one absolute God. They are also intended to express the nature, essence, and wholeness of Deity. The attributes of God are justice, mercy, wisdom, goodness, and so on.
Question.–Is there more than one God or Principle? Answer.–There is not. Principle and its idea is one, and this one is God, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Being, and His reflection is man and the universe. Omni is adopted from the Latin adjective signifying all. Hence God combines all-power or potency, all-science or true knowledge, all-presence. The varied manifestations of Christian Science indicate Mind, never matter, and have one Principle.
Real versus unreal
Question.–What are spirits and souls? Answer.–To human belief, they are personalities constituted of mind and matter, life and death, truth and error, good and evil; but these contrasting pairs of terms represent contraries, as Christian Science reveals, which neither dwell together nor assimilate. Truth is immortal; error is mortal. Truth is limitless; error is limited. Truth is intelligent; error is non-intelligent. Moreover, Truth is real, and error is unreal. This last statement contains the point you will most reluctantly admit, although first and last it is the most important to understand.
Mankind redeemed
The term souls or spirits is as improper as the term gods. Soul or Spirit signifies Deity and nothing else. There is no finite soul nor spirit. Soul or Spirit means only one Mind, and cannot be rendered in the plural. Heathen mythology and Jewish theology have perpetuated the fallacy that intelligence, soul, and life can be in matter; and idolatry and ritualism are the outcome of all man-made beliefs. The Science of Christianity comes with fan in hand to separate the chaff from the wheat. Science will declare God aright, and Christianity will demonstrate this declaration and its divine Principle, making mankind better physically, morally, and spiritually.
Two chief commands
Question.–What are the demands of the Science of Soul? Answer.–The first demand of this Science is, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” This me is Spirit. Therefore the command means this: Thou shalt have no intelligence, no life, no substance, no truth, no love, but that which is spiritual. The second is like unto it, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” It should be thoroughly understood that all men have one Mind, one God and Father, one Life, Truth, and Love. Mankind will become perfect in proportion as this fact becomes apparent, war will cease and the true brotherhood of man will be established. Having no other gods, turning to no other but the one perfect Mind to guide him, man is the likeness of God, pure and eternal, having that Mind which was also in Christ.
Soul not confined in body
Science reveals Spirit, Soul, as not in the body, and God as not in man but as reflected by man. The greater cannot be in the lesser. The belief that the greater can be in the lesser is an error that works ill. This is a leading point in the Science of Soul, that Principle is not in its idea. Spirit, Soul, is not confined in man, and is never in matter. We reason imperfectly from effect to cause, when we conclude that matter is the effect of Spirit; but a priori reasoning shows material existence to be enigmatical. Spirit gives the true mental idea. We cannot interpret Spirit, Mind, through matter. Matter neither sees, hears, nor feels.
Sinlessness of Mind, Soul
Reasoning from cause to effect in the Science of Mind, we begin with Mind, which must be understood through the idea which expresses it and cannot be learned from its opposite, matter. Thus we arrive at Truth, or intelligence, which evolves its own unerring idea and never can be coordinate with human illusions. If Soul sinned, it would be mortal, for sin is mortality’s self, because it kills itself. If Truth is immortal, error must be mortal, because error is unlike Truth. Because Soul is immortal, Soul cannot sin, for sin is not the eternal verity of being.
Question.–What is the scientific statement of being? Answer. – There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual.
Spiritual synonyms
Question.–What is substance? Answer. – Substance is that which is eternal and incapable of discord and decay. Truth, Life, and Love are substance, as the Scriptures use this word in Hebrews: “The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Spirit, the synonym of Mind, Soul, or God, is the only real substance. The spiritual universe, including individual man, is a compound idea, reflecting the divine substance of Spirit.
Eternity of Life
Question.–What is Life? Answer.–Life is divine Principle, Mind, Soul, Spirit. Life is without beginning and without end. Eternity, not time, expresses the thought of Life, and time is no part of eternity. One ceases in proportion as the other is recognized. Time is finite; eternity is forever infinite. Life is neither in nor of matter. What is termed matter is unknown to Spirit, which includes in itself all substance and is Life eternal. Matter is a human concept. Life is divine Mind. Life is not limited. Death and finiteness are unknown to Life. If Life ever had a beginning, it would also have an ending.
Question.–What is intelligence? Answer.–Intelligence is omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. It is the primal and eternal quality of infinite Mind, of the triune Principle,–Life, Truth, and Love,–named God.
True sense of infinitude
Question.–What is Mind? Answer.–Mind is God. The exterminator of error is the great truth that God, good, is the only Mind, and that the supposititious opposite of infinite Mind – called devil or evil–is not Mind, is not Truth, but error, without intelligence or reality. There can be but one Mind, because there is but one God; and if mortals claimed no other Mind and accepted no other, sin would be unknown. We can have but one Mind, if that one is infinite. We bury the sense of infinitude, when we admit that, although God is infinite, evil has a place in this infinity, for evil can have no place, where all space is filled with God.
The sole governor
We lose the high signification of omnipotence, when after admitting that God, or good, is omnipresent and has all-power, we still believe there is another power, named evil. This belief that there is more than one mind is as pernicious to divine theology as are ancient mythology and pagan idolatry. With one Father, even God, the whole family of man would be brethren; and with one Mind and that God, or good, the brotherhood of man would consist of Love and Truth, and have unity of Principle and spiritual power which constitute divine Science. The supposed existence of more than one mind was the basic error of idolatry. This error assumed the loss of spiritual power, the loss of the spiritual presence of Life as infinite Truth without an unlikeness, and the loss of Love as ever present and universal.
The divine standard of perfection
Divine Science explains the abstract statement that there is one Mind by the following self-evident proposition: If God, or good, is real, then evil, the unlikeness of God, is unreal. And evil can only seem to be real by giving reality to the unreal. The children of God have but one Mind. How can good lapse into evil, when God, the Mind of man, never sins? The standard of perfection was originally God and man. Has God taken down His own standard, and has man fallen?
Indestructible relationship
God is the creator of man, and, the divine Principle of man remaining perfect, the divine idea or reflection, man, remains perfect. Man is the expression of God’s being. If there ever was a moment when man did not express the divine perfection, then there was a moment when man did not express God, and consequently a time when Deity was unexpressed – that is, without entity. If man has lost perfection, then he has lost his perfect Principle, the divine Mind. If man ever existed without this perfect Principle or Mind, then man’s existence was a myth.
The relations of God and man, divine Principle and idea, are indestructible in Science; and Science knows no lapse from nor return to harmony, but holds the divine order or spiritual law, in which God and all that He creates are perfect and eternal, to have remained unchanged in its eternal history.
Celestial evidence
The unlikeness of Truth, – named error, – the opposite of Science, and the evidence before the five corporeal senses, afford no indication of the grand facts of being; even as these so-called senses receive no intimation of the earth’s motions or of the science of astronomy, but yield assent to astronomical propositions on the authority of natural science. The facts of divine Science should be admitted, although the evidence as to these facts is not supported by evil, by matter, or by material sense,–because the evidence that God and man coexist is fully sustained by spiritual sense. Man is, and forever has been, God’s reflection. God is infinite, therefore ever present, and there is no other power nor presence. Hence the spirituality of the universe is the only fact of creation. “Let God be true, but every [material] man a liar.”
The test of experience
Question.–Are doctrines and creeds a benefit to man? Answer.–The author subscribed to an orthodox creed in early youth, and tried to adhere to it until she caught the first gleam of that which interprets God as above mortal sense. This view rebuked human beliefs, and gave the spiritual import, expressed through Science, of all that proceeds from the divine Mind. Since then her highest creed has been divine Science, which, reduced to human apprehension, she has named Christian Science. This Science teaches man that God is the only Life, and that this Life is Truth and Love; that God is to be understood, adored, and demonstrated; that divine Truth casts out suppositional error and heals the sick.
God’s law destroys evil
The way which leads to Christian Science is straight and narrow. God has set His signet upon Science, making it coordinate with all that is real and only with that which is harmonious and eternal. Sickness, sin, and death, being inharmonious, do not originate in God nor belong to His government. His law, rightly understood, destroys them. Jesus furnished proofs of these statements.
Evanescent materiality
Question.–What is error? Answer.–Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind nor one of Mind’s faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which seemeth to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity–namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.
Unrealities that seem real
Question.–Is there no sin? Answer. – All reality is in God and His creation, harmonious and eternal. That which He creates is good, and He makes all that is made. Therefore the only reality of sin, sickness, or death is the awful fact that unrealities seem real to human, erring belief, until God strips off their disguise. They are not true, because they are not of God. We learn in Christian
Science that all inharmony of mortal mind or body is illusion, possessing neither reality nor identity though seeming to be real and identical.
Christ the ideal Truth
The Science of Mind disposes of all evil. Truth, God, is not the father of error. Sin, sickness, and death are to be classified as effects of error. Christ came to destroy the belief of sin. The Godprinciple is omnipresent and omnipotent. God is everywhere, and nothing apart from Him is present or has power. Christ is the ideal Truth, that comes to heal sickness and sin through Christian Science, and attributes all power to God. Jesus is the name of the man who, more than all other men, has presented Christ, the true idea of God, healing the sick and the sinning and destroying the power of death. Jesus is the human man, and Christ is the divine idea; hence the duality of Jesus the Christ.
Jesus not God
In an age of ecclesiastical despotism, Jesus introduced the teaching and practice of Christianity, affording the proof of Christianity’s truth and love; but to reach his example and to test its unerring Sci- ence according to his rule, healing sickness, sin, and death, a better understanding of God as divine Principle, Love, rather than personality or the man Jesus, is required.
Jesus not understood
Jesus established what he said by demonstration, thus making his acts of higher importance than his words. He proved what he taught. This is the Science of Christianity. Jesus proved the Principle, which heals the sick and casts out error, to be divine. Few, however, except his students understood in the least his teachings and their glorious proofs, – namely, that Life, Truth, and Love (the Principle of this unacknowledged Science) destroy all error, evil, disease, and death.
Miracles rejected
The reception accorded to Truth in the early Christian era is repeated to-day. Whoever introduces the Science of Christianity will be scoffed at and scourged with worse cords than those which cut the flesh. To the ignorant age in which it first appears, Science seems to be a mistake,–hence the misinterpretation and consequent maltreatment which it receives. Christian marvels (and marvel is the simple meaning of the Greek word rendered miracle in the New Testament) will be misunderstood and misused by many, until the glorious Principle of these marvels is gained.
Divine fulfilment
If sin, sickness, and death are as real as Life, Truth, and Love, then they must all be from the same source; God must be their author. Now Jesus came to destroy sin, sickness, and death yet the Scriptures aver, “I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” Is it possible, then, to believe that the evils which Jesus lived to destroy are real or the offspring of the divine will?
Truth destroys falsity
Despite the hallowing influence of Truth in the destruction of error, must error still be immortal? Truth spares all that is true. If evil is real, Truth must make it so; but error, not Truth, is the author of the unreal, and the unreal vanishes, while all that is real is eternal. The apostle says that the mission of Christ is to “destroy the works of the devil.” Truth destroys falsity and error, for light and darkness cannot dwell together. Light extinguishes the darkness, and the Scripture declares that there is “no night there.” To Truth there is no error,–all is Truth. To infinite Spirit there is no matter,–all is Spirit, divine Principle and its idea.
Fleshly factors unreal
Question.–What is man? Answer.–Man is not matter; he is not made up of brain, blood, bones, and other material elements. The Scriptures inform us that man is made in the image and likeness of God. Matter is not that likeness. The likeness of Spirit cannot be so unlike Spirit. Man is spiritual and perfect; and because he is spiritual and perfect, he must be so understood in Christian Science. Man is idea, the image, of Love; lie is not physique. He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas; the generic term for all that reflects God’s image and likeness; the conscious identity of being as found in Science, in which man is the reflection of God, or Mind, and therefore is eternal; that which has no separate mind from God; that which has not a single quality underived from Deity; that which possesses no life, intelligence, nor creative power of his own, but reflects spiritually all that belongs to his Maker.
And God said: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Man unfallen
Man is incapable of sin, sickness, and death. The real man cannot depart from holiness, nor can God, by whom man is evolved, engender the capacity or freedom to sin. A mortal sinner is not
God’s man. Mortals are the counterfeits of immortals. They are the children of the wicked one, or the one evil, which declares that man begins in dust or as a material embryo. In divine Science, God and the real man are inseparable as divine Principle and idea.
Mortals are not immortals
Error, urged to its final limits, is self-destroyed. Error will cease to claim that soul is in body, that life and intelligence are in matter, and that this matter is man. God is the Principle of man, and man is the idea of God. Hence man is not mortal nor material. Mortals will disappear, and immortals, or the children of God, will appear as the only and eternal verities of man. Mortals are not fallen children of God. They never had a perfect state of being, which may subsequently be regained. They were, from the beginning of mortal history, “conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity.” Mortality is finally swallowed up in immortality. Sin, sickness, and death must disappear to give place to the facts which belong to immortal man.
Imperishable identity
Learn this, O mortal, and earnestly seek the spiritual status of man, which is outside of all material selfhood. Remember that the Scriptures say of mortal man: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.”
The kingdom within
When speaking of God’s children, not the children of men, Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you;” that is, Truth and Love reign in the real man, showing that man in God’s image is unfallen and eternal. Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick. Thus Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is intact, universal, and that man is pure and holy. Man is not a material habitation for Soul; he is himself spiritual. Soul, being Spirit, is seen in nothing imperfect nor material.
Material body never God’s idea
Whatever is material is mortal. To the five corporeal senses, man appears to be matter and mind united; but Christian Science reveals man as the idea of God, and declares the corporeal senses to be mortal and erring illusions. Divine Science shows it to be impossible that a material body, though interwoven with matter’s highest stratum, misnamed mind, should be man,–the genuine and perfect man, the immortal idea of being, indestructible and eternal. Were it otherwise, man would be annihilated.
Reflection of Spirit
Question.–What are body and Soul? Answer. – Identity is the reflection of Spirit, the reflection in multifarious forms of the living Principle, Love. Soul is the substance, Life, and intelligence of man, which is individualized, but not in matter. Soul can never reflect anything inferior to Spirit.
Man inseparable from Spirit
Man is the expression of Soul. The Indians caught some glimpses of the underlying reality, when they called a certain beautiful lake “the smile of the Great Spirit.” Separated from man, who expresses Soul, Spirit would be a nonentity; man, divorced from Spirit, would lose his entity. But there is, there can be, no such division, for man is coexistent with God.
A vacant domicile
What evidence of Soul or of immortality have you within mortality? Even according to the teachings of natural science, man has never beheld Spirit or Soul leaving a body or entering it. What basis is there for the theory of indwelling spirit, except the claim of mortal belief? What would be thought of the declaration that a house was inhabited, and by a certain class of persons, when no such persons were ever seen to go into the house or to come out of it, nor were they even visible through the windows? Who can see a soul in the body?
Harmonious functions
Question.–Does brain think, and do nerves feel, and is there intelligence in matter? Answer.–No, not if God is true and mortal man a liar. The assertion that there can be pain or pleasure in matter is erroneous. That body is most harmonious in which the discharge of the natural functions is least noticeable. How can intelligence dwell in matter when matter is non-intelligent and brain-lobes cannot think? Matter cannot perform the functions of Mind. Error says, “I am man;” but this belief is mortal and far from actual. From beginning to end, whatever is mortal is composed of material human beliefs and of nothing else. That only is real which reflects God. St. Paul said, “But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace, . . . I conferred not with flesh and blood.”
Immortal birthright
Mortal man is really a self-contradictory phrase, for man is not mortal, “neither indeed can be;” man is immortal. If a child is the offspring of physical sense and not of Soul, the child must have a material, not a spiritual origin. With what truth, then, could the Scriptural rejoicing be uttered by any mother, “I have gotten a man from the Lord”? On the contrary, if aught comes from God, it cannot be mortal and material; it must be immortal and spiritual.
Matter’s supposed selfhood
Matter is neither self-existent nor a product of Spirit. An image of mortal thought, reflected on the retina, is all that the eye beholds. Matter cannot see, feel, hear, taste, nor smell. It is not selfcognizant,–cannot feel itself, see itself, nor understand itself. Take away so-called mortal mind, which constitutes matter’s supposed selfhood, and matter can take no cognizance of matter. Does that which we call dead ever see, hear, feel, or use any of the physical senses?
Chaos and darkness
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” (Genesis i. 1, 2.) In the vast forever, in the Science and truth of being, the only facts are Spirit and its innumerable creations. Darkness and chaos are the imaginary opposites of light, understanding, and eternal harmony, and they are the elements of nothingness.
Spiritual reflection
We admit that black is not a color, because it reflects no light. So evil should be denied identity or power, because it has none of the divine hues. Paul says: “For the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” (Romans i. 20.)
When the substance of Spirit appears in Christian Science, the nothingness of matter is recognized. Where the spirit of God is, and there is no place where God is not, evil becomes nothing, – the opposite of the something of Spirit. If there is no spiritual reflection, then there remains only the darkness of vacuity and not a trace of heavenly tints.
Harmony from Spirit
Nerves are an element of the belief that there is sensation in matter, whereas matter is devoid of sensation. Consciousness, as well as action, is governed by Mind, – is in God, the origin and governor of all that Science reveals. Material sense has its realm apart from Science in the unreal. Harmonious action proceeds from Spirit, God. inharmony has no Principle; its action is erroneous and presupposes man to be in matter. Inharmony would make matter the cause as well as the effect of intelligence, or Soul, thus attempting to separate Mind from God.
Evil non-existent
Man is not God, and God is not man. Again, God, or good, never made man capable of sin. It is the opposite of good–that is, evil–which seems to make men capable of wrong-doing. Hence, evil is but an illusion, and it has no real basis. Evil is a false belief. God is not its author. The supposititious parent of evil is a lie.
Vapor and nothingness
The Bible declares: “All things were made by Him [the divine Word]; and without Him was not anything, made that was made.” This is the eternal verity of divine Science. If sin, sickness, death were understood as nothingness, they would disappear. As vapor melts before the sun, so evil would vanish before the reality of good. One must hide the other. How important, then, to choose good as the reality! Man is tributary to God, Spirit, and to nothing else. God’s being is infinity, freedom, harmony, and boundless bliss. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” Like the archpriests of yore, man is free “to enter into the holiest,”–the realm of God.
The fruit forbidden
Material sense never helps mortals to understand Spirit, God. Through spiritual sense only, man comprehends and loves Deity. The various con- tradictions of the Science of Mind by the material senses do not change the unseen Truth, which remains forever intact. The forbidden fruit of knowledge, against which wisdom warns man, is the testimony of error, declaring existence to be at the mercy of death, and good and evil to be capable of commingling. This is the significance of the Scripture concerning this “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,”–this growth of material belief, of which it is said: “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Human hypotheses first assume the reality of sickness, sin, and death, and then assume the necessity of these evils because of their admitted actuality. These human verdicts are the procurers of all discord.
Sense and pure Soul
If Soul sins, it must be mortal. Sin has the elements of self-destruction. It cannot sustain itself. If sin is supported, God must uphold it, and this is impossible, since Truth cannot support error. Soul is the divine Principle of man and never sins, hence the immortality of Soul. In Science we learn that it is material sense, not Soul, which sins; and it will be found that it is the sense of sin which is lost, and not a sinful soul. When reading the Scriptures, the substitution of the word sense for soul gives the exact meaning in a majority of cases.
Soul defined
Human thought has adulterated the meaning of the word soul through the hypothesis that soul is both an evil and a good intelligence, resident in matter. The proper use of the word soul can always be gained by substituting the word God, where the deific meaning is required. In other cases, use the word sense, and you will have the scientific signification. As used in Christian Science, Soul is properly the synonym of Spirit, or God; but out of Science, soul is identical with sense, with material sensation.
Sonship of Jesus
Question. – Is it important to understand these explanations in order to heal the sick? Answer.–It is, since Christ is “the way” and the truth casting out all error. Jesus called himself “the Son of man,” but not the son of Joseph. As woman is but a species of the genera, he was literally the Son of Man. Jesus was the highest human concept of the perfect man. He was inseparable from Christ, the Messiah,–the divine idea of God outside the flesh. This enabled Jesus to demonstrate his control over matter. Angels announced to the Wisemen of old this dual appearing, and angels whisper it, through faith, to the hungering heart in every age.
Sickness erroneous
Sickness is part of the error which Truth casts out. Error will not expel error. Christian Science is the law of Truth, which heals the sick, on the basis of the one Mind or God. It can heal in no other way, since the human, mortal mind so-called is not a healer, but causes the belief in disease.
True healing transcendent
Then comes the question, how do drugs, hygiene, and animal magnetism heal? It may be affirmed that they do not heal, but only relieve suffering temporarily, exchanging one disease for another. We classify disease as error, which nothing but Truth or Mind can heal, and this Mind must be divine, not human. Mind transcends all other power, and will ultimately supersede all other means in healing. In order to heal by Science, you must not be ignorant of the moral and spiritual demands of Science nor disobey them. Moral ignorance or sin affects your demonstration, and hinders its approach to the standard in Christian Science.
Terms adopted by the author
After the author’s sacred discovery, she affixed the name “Science” to Christianity, the name “error” to corporeal sense, and the name “substance” to Mind. Science has called the world to battle over this issue and its demonstration, which heals the sick, destroys error, and reveals the universal harmony. To those natural Christian Scientists, the ancient worthies, and to Christ Jesus, God certainly revealed the spirit of Christian Science, if not the absolute letter.
Science the way
Because the Science of Mind seems to bring into dishonor the ordinary scientific schools, which wrestle with material observations alone, this Science has met with opposition; but if any system honors God, it ought to receive aid, not opposition, from all thinking persons. And Christian Science does honor God as no other theory honors Him, and it does this in the way of His appointing, by doing many wonderful works through the divine name and nature. One must fulfil one’s mission without timidity or dissimulation, for to be well done, the work must be done unselfishly. Christianity will never be based on a divine Principle and so found to be unerring, until its absolute Science is reached. When this is accomplished, neither pride, prejudice, bigotry, nor envy can wash away its foundation, for it is built upon the rock, Christ.
Mindless methods
Question.–Does Christian Science, or metaphysical healing, include medication, material hygiene, mesmerism, hypnotism, theosophy, or spiritualism? Answer. – Not one of them is included in it. In divine Science, the supposed laws of matter yield to the law of Mind. What are termed natural science and material laws are the objective states of mortal mind. The physical universe expresses the conscious and unconscious thoughts of mortals. Physical force and mortal mind are one. Drugs and hygiene oppose the supremacy of the divine Mind. Drugs and inert matter are unconscious, mindless. Certain results, supposed to proceed from drugs, are really caused by the faith in them which the false human consciousness is educated to feel.
Animal magnetism error
Mesmerism is mortal, material illusion. Animal magnetism is the voluntary or involuntary action of error in all its forms; it is the human antipode of divine Science. Science must triumph over material sense, and Truth over error, thus putting an end to the hypotheses involved in all false theories and practices.
Error only ephemeral
Question. – Is materiality the concomitant of spirituality, and is material sense a necessary preliminary to the understanding and expression of Spirit?
Answer.–If error is necessary to define or to reveal Truth, the answer is yes; but not otherwise. Material sense is an absurd phrase, for matter has no sensation. Science declares that Mind, not matter, sees, hears, feels, speaks. Whatever contradicts this statement is the false sense, which ever betrays mortals into sickness, sin, and death. If the unimportant and evil appear, only soon to disappear because of their uselessness or their iniquity, then these ephemeral views of error ought to be obliterated by Truth. Why malign Christian Science for instructing mortals how to make sin, disease, and death appear more and more unreal?
Scientific translations
Emerge gently from matter into Spirit. Think not to thwart the spiritual ultimate of all things, but come naturally into Spirit through better health and morals and as the result of spiritual growth. Not death, but the understanding of Life, makes man immortal. The belief that life can be in matter or soul in body, and that man springs from dust or from an egg, is the result of the mortal error which Christ, or Truth, destroys by fulfilling the spiritual law of being, in which man is perfect, even as the “Father which is in heaven is perfect.” If thought yields its dominion to other ‘ powers, it cannot outline on the body its own beautiful images, but it effaces them and delineates foreign agents, called disease and sin.
Material beliefs
The heathen gods of mythology controlled war and agriculture as much as nerves control sensation or muscles measure strength. To say that strength is in matter, is like saying that the power is in the lever. The notion of any life or intelligence in matter is without foundation in fact, and you can have no faith in falsehood when you have learned falsehood’s true nature.
Sense versus Soul
Suppose one accident happens to the eye, another to the ear, and so on, until every corporeal sense is quenched. What is man’s remedy? To die, that he may regain these senses? Even then he must gain spiritual understanding and spiritual sense in order to possess immortal consciousness. Earth’s preparatory school must be improved to the utmost. In reality man never dies. The belief that he dies will not establish his scientific harmony. Death is not the result of Truth but of error, and one error will not correct another.
Death an error
Jesus proved by the prints of the nails, that his body was the same immediately after death as before. If death restores sight, sound, and strength to man, then death is not an enemy but a better friend than Life. Alas for the blindness of belief, which makes harmony conditional upon death and matter, and yet supposes Mind unable to produce harmony! So long as this error of belief remains, mortals will continue mortal in belief and subject to chance and change.
Permanent sensibility
Sight, hearing, all the spiritual senses of man, are eternal. They cannot be lost. Their reality and immortality are in Spirit and understanding, not in matter,–hence their permanence. If this were not so, man would be speedily annihilated. If the five corporeal senses were the medium through which to understand God, then palsy, blindness, and deafness would place man in a terrible situation, where he would be like those “having no hope, and without God in the world;” but as a matter of fact, these calamities often drive mortals to seek and to find a higher sense of happiness and existence.
Exercise of Mind-faculties
Life is deathless. Life is the origin and ultimate of man, never attainable through death, but gained by walking in the pathway of Truth both before and after that which is called death. There is more Christianity in seeing and hearing spiritually than materially. There is more Science in the perpetual exercise of the Mind-faculties than in their loss. Lost they cannot be, while Mind remains. The apprehension of this gave sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf centuries ago, and it will repeat the wonder.
Understanding versus belief
Question.–You speak of belief. Who or what is it that believes? Answer.–Spirit is all-knowing; this precludes the need of believing. Matter cannot believe, and Mind understands. The body cannot believe. The believer and belief are one and are mortal. Christian evidence is founded on Science or demonstrable Truth, flowing from immortal Mind, and there is in reality no such thing as mortal mind. Mere belief is blindness without Principle from which to explain the reason of its hope. The belief that life is sentient and intelligent matter is erroneous.
The Apostle James said, “Show me thy faith without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works.” The understanding that Life is God, Spirit, lengthens our days by strengthening our trust in the deathless reality of Life, its almightiness and immortality.
Confirmation by healing
This faith relies upon an understood Principle. This Principle makes whole the diseased, and brings out the enduring and harmonious phases of things. The result of our teachings is their sufficient confirmation. When, on the strength of these instructions, you are able to banish a severe malady, the cure shows that you understand this teaching, and therefore you receive the blessing of Truth.
Belief and firm trust
The Hebrew and Greek words often translated belief differ somewhat in meaning from that conveyed by the English verb believe; they have more the significance of faith, understanding, trust, constancy, firmness. Hence the Scriptures often appear in our common version to approve and endorse belief, when they mean to enforce the necessity of understanding.
All faculties from Mind
Question.–Do the five corporeal senses constitute man? Answer.–Christian Science sustains with immortal proof the impossibility of any material sense, and defines these so-called senses as mortal beliefs, the testimony of which cannot be true either of man or of his Maker. The corporeal senses can take no cognizance of spiritual reality and immortality. Nerves have no more sensation, apart from what belief bestows upon them, than the fibres of a plant. Mind alone possesses all faculties, perception, and comprehension. Therefore mental endowments are not at the mercy of organization and decomposition,–otherwise the very worms could unfashion man. If it were possible for the real senses of man to be injured, Soul could reproduce them in all their perfection; but they cannot be disturbed nor destroyed, since they exist in immortal Mind, not in matter.
Possibilities of Life
The less mind there is manifested in matter the better. When the unthinking lobster loses its claw, the claw grows again. If the Science of Life were understood, it would be found that the senses of Mind are never lost and that matter has no sensation. Then the human limb would be replaced as readily as the lobster’s claw,–not with an artificial limb, but with the genuine one. Any hypothesis which supposes life to be in matter is an educated belief. In infancy this belief is not equal to guiding the hand to the mouth; and as consciousness develops, this belief goes out,–yields to the reality of everlasting Life.
Decalogue disregarded
Corporeal sense defrauds and lies; it breaks all the commands of the Mosaic Decalogue to meet its own demands. How then can this sense be the Godgiven channel to man of divine blessings or understanding? How can man, reflecting God, be dependent on material means for knowing, hearing, seeing? Who dares to say that the senses of man can be at one time the medium for sinning against God, at another the medium for obeying God? An affirmative reply would contradict the Scripture, for the same fountain sendeth not forth sweet waters and bitter.
Organic construction valueless
The corporeal senses are the only source of evil or error. Christian Science shows them to be false, because matter has no sensation, and no organic construction can give it hearing and sight nor make it the medium of Mind. Outside the material sense of things, all is harmony. A wrong sense of God, man, and creation is non-sense, want of sense. Mortal belief would have the material senses sometimes good and sometimes bad. It assures mortals that there is real pleasure in sin; but the grand truths of Christian Science dispute this error.
Will-power an animal propensity
Will-power is but a product of belief, and this belief commits depredations on harmony. Human will is an animal propensity, not a faculty of Soul. Hence it cannot govern man aright. Christian Science reveals Truth and Love as the motive-powers of man. Will – blind, stubborn, and headlong–cooperates with appetite and passion. From this cooperation arises its evil. From this also comes its powerlessness, since all power belongs to God, good.
Theories helpless
The Science of Mind needs to be understood. Until it is understood, mortals are more or less deprived of Truth. Human theories are helpless to make man harmonious or immortal, since he is so already, according to Christian Science. Our only need is to know this and reduce to practice the real man’s divine Principle, Love
True nature and origin
“Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesyings.” Human belief–or knowledge gained from the so-called material senses – would, by fair logic, annihilate man along with the dissolving elements of clay. The scientifically Christian explanations of the nature and origin of man destroy all material sense with immortal testimony. This immortal testimony ushers in the spiritual sense of being, which can be obtained in no other way.
Sleep an illusion
Sleep and mesmerism explain the mythical nature of material sense. Sleep shows material sense as either oblivion, nothingness, or an illusion or dream. Under the mesmeric illusion of belief, a man will think that he is freezing when he is warm, and that he is swimming when he is on dry land. Needle-thrusts will not hurt him. A delicious perfume will seem intolerable. Animal magnetism thus uncovers material sense, and shows it to be a belief without actual foundation or validity. Change the belief, and the sensation changes. Destroy the belief, and the sensation disappears.
Man linked with Spirit
Material man is made up of involuntary and voluntary error, of a negative right and a positive wrong, the latter calling itself right. Man’s spiritual individuality is never wrong. It is the likeness of man’s Maker. Matter cannot connect mortals with the true origin and facts of being, in which all must end. It is only by acknowledging the supremacy of Spirit, which annuls the claims of matter, that mortals can lay off mortality and find the indissoluble spiritual link which establishes man forever in the divine likeness, inseparable from his creator.
Material man as a dream
The belief that matter and mind are one, – that matter is awake at one time and asleep at another, sometimes presenting no appearance of mind, this belief culminates in another belief, that man dies. Science reveals material man as never the real being. The dream or belief goes on, whether our eyes are closed or open. In sleep, memory and consciousness are lost from the body, and they wander whither they will apparently with their own separate embodiment. Personality is not the individuality of man. A wicked man may have an attractive personality.
Spiritual existence the one fact
When we are awake, we dream of the pains and pleasures of matter. Who will say, even though he does not understand Christian Science, that this dream–rather than the dreamer–may not be mortal man? Who can rationally say otherwise, when the dream leaves mortal man intact in body and thought, although the so-called dreamer is unconscious? For right reasoning there should be but one fact before the thought, namely, spiritual existence. In reality there is no other existence, since Life cannot be united to its unlikeness, mortality.
Mind one and all
Being is holiness, harmony, immortality. It is already proved that a knowledge of this, even in small degree, will uplift the physical and moral standard of mortals, will increase longevity, will purify and elevate character. Thus progress will finally destroy all error, and bring immortality to light. We know that a statement proved to be good must be correct. New thoughts are constantly obtaining the floor. These two contradictory theories–that matter is something, or that all is Mind–will dispute the ground, until one is acknowledged to be the victor. Discussing his campaign, General Grant said: “I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.” Science says: All is Mind and Mind’s idea. You must fight it out on this line. Matter can afford you no aid.
Scientific ultimatum
The notion that mind and matter commingle in the human illusion as to sin, sickness, and death must eventually submit to the Science of Mind, which denies this notion. God is Mind, and God is infinite; hence all is Mind. On this statement rests the Science of being, and the Principle of this Science is divine, demonstrating harmony and immortality.
Victory for Truth
The conservative theory, long believed, is that there are two factors, matter and mind, uniting on some impossible basis. This theory would keep truth and error always at war. Victory would perch on neither banner.
On the other hand, Christian Science speedily shows Truth to be triumphant. To corporeal sense, the sun appears to rise and set, and the earth to stand still; but astronomical science contradicts this, and explains the solar system as working on a different plan. All the evidence of physical sense and all the knowledge obtained from physical sense must yield to Science, to the immortal truth of all things.
Mental preparation
Question,–Will you explain sickness and show how it is to be healed? Answer. – The method of Christian Science Mind-healing is touched upon in a previous chapter entitled Christian Science Practice. A full answer to the above question involves teaching, which enables the healer to demonstrate and prove for himself the Principle and rule of Christian Science or metaphysical healing.
Mind destroys all ills
Mind must be found superior to all the beliefs of the five corporeal senses, and able to destroy all ills. Sickness is a belief, which must be annihilated by the divine Mind. Disease is an experience of so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body. Christian Science takes away this physical sense of discord, just as it removes any other sense of moral or mental inharmony. That man is material, and that matter suffers,–these propositions can only seem real and natural in illusion. Any sense of soul in matter is not the reality of being. If Jesus awakened Lazarus from the dream, illusion, of death, this proved that the Christ could improve on a false sense. Who dares to doubt this consummate test of the power and willingness of divine Mind to hold man forever intact in his perfect state, and to govern man’s entire action? Jesus said: “Destroy this temple [body], and in three days I [Mind] will raise it up;” and he did this for tired humanity’s reassurance.
Inexhaustible divine Love
Is it not a species of infidelity to believe that so great a work as the Messiah’s was done for himself or for God, who needed no help from Jesus’ example to preserve the eternal harmony? But mortals did need this help, and Jesus pointed the way for them. Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need. It is not well to imagine that Jesus demonstrated the divine power to heal only for a select number or for a limited period of time, since to all mankind and in every hour, divine Love supplies all good.
Reason and Science
The miracle of grace is no miracle to Love. Jesus demonstrated the inability of corporeality, as well as the infinite ability of Spirit, thus helping erring human sense to flee from its own convictions and seek safety in divine Science. Reason, rightly directed, serves to correct the errors of corporeal sense; but sin, sickness, and death will seem real (even as the experiences of the sleeping dream seem real) until the Science of man’s eternal harmony breaks their illusion with the unbroken reality of scientific being.
Which of these two theories concerning man are you ready to accept? One is the mortal testimony, changing, dying, unreal. The other is the eternal and real evidence, bearing Truth’s signet, its lap piled high with immortal fruits.
Followers of Jesus
Our Master cast out devils (evils) and healed the sick. It should be said of his followers also, that they cast fear and all evil out of themselves and others and heal the sick.
God will heal the sick through man, whenever man is governed by God. Truth casts out error now as surely as it did nineteen centuries ago. All of Truth is not understood; hence its healing power is not fully demonstrated.
Destruction of all evil
If sickness is true or the idea of Truth, you cannot destroy sickness, and it would be absurd to try. Then classify sickness and error as our Master did, when he spoke of the sick, “whom Satan hath bound,” and find a sovereign antidote for error in the lifegiving power of Truth acting on human belief, a power which opens the prison doors to such as are bound, and sets the captive free physically and morally.
Steadfast and calm trust
When the illusion of sickness or sin tempts you, cling steadfastly to God and His idea. Allow nothing but His likeness to abide in your thought. Let neither fear nor doubt overshadow your clear sense and calm trust, that the recognition of life harmonious–as Life eternally is–can destroy any painful sense of, or belief in, that which Life is not. Let Christian Science, instead of corporeal sense, support your understanding of being, and this understanding will supplant error with Truth, replace mortality with immortality, and silence discord with harmony.
Rudiments and growth
Question.–How can I progress most rapidly in the understanding of Christian Science? Answer.–Study thoroughly the letter and imbibe the spirit. Adhere to the divine Principle of Christian Science and follow the behests of God, abiding steadfastly in wisdom, Truth, and Love. In the Science of Mind, you will soon ascertain that error cannot destroy error. You will also learn that in Science there is no transfer of evil suggestions from one mortal to another, for there is but one Mind, and this ever-present omnipotent Mind is reflected by man and governs the entire universe. You will learn that in Christian Science the first duty is to obey God, to have one Mind, and to love another as yourself.
Condition of progress
We all must learn that Life is God. Ask yourself: Am I living the life that approaches the supreme good? Am I demonstrating the healing power of Truth and Love? If so then the way will grow brighter “unto the perfect day.” Your fruits will prove what the understanding of God brings to man. Hold perpetually this thought,–that it is the spiritual idea, the Holy Ghost and Christ, which enables you to demonstrate, with scientific certainty, the rule of healing, based upon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being.
Triumph over death
“The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law,”–the law of mortal belief, at war with the facts of immortal Life, even with the spiritual law which says to the grave, “Where is thy victory?” But “when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.”
Question.–Have Christian Scientists any religious creed? Answer.–They have not, if by that term is meant doctrinal beliefs. The following is a brief exposition of the important points, or religious tenets, of Christian Science: 1. As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life. 2. We acknowledge and adore one supreme and infinite God. We acknowledge His Son, one Christ; the Holy Ghost or divine Comforter; and man in God’s image and likeness. 3. We acknowledge God’s forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal. But the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts. 4. We acknowledge Jesus’ atonement as the evidence of divine, efficacious Love, unfolding man’s unity with God through Christ Jesus the Way-shower; and we acknowledge that man is saved through Christ, through Truth, Life, and Love as demonstrated by the Galilean Prophet in healing the sick and overcoming sin and death. 5. We acknowledge that the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection served to uplift faith to understand eternal Life, even the allness of Soul, Spirit, and the nothingness of matter. 6. And we solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure.
KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES
These things saith He that is holy, He that is true, He that hath the key of David, He that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth; I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.–REVELATION.
Chapter XV – Genesis
And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by the name of God Almighty; but by My name Jehovah was I not known to them.–EXODUS.
All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.–JOHN.
Spiritual interpretation
SCIENTIFIC interpretation of the Scriptures properly starts with the beginning of the Old Testament, chiefly because the spiritual import of the Word, in its earliest articulations, often seems so smothered by the immediate context as to require explication; whereas the New Testament narratives are clearer and come nearer the heart. Jesus illumines them, showing the poverty of mortal existence, but richly recompensing human want and woe with spiritual gain. The incarnation of Truth, that amplification of wonder and glory which angels could only whisper and which God illustrated by light and harmony, is consonant with ever-present Love. So-called mystery and miracle, which subserve the end of natural good, are explained by that Love for whose rest the weary ones sigh when needing something more native to their immortal cravings than the history of perpetual evil.
Spiritual overture
A second necessity for beginning with Genesis is that the living and real prelude of the older Scriptures is so brief that it would almost seem, from the preponderance of unreality in the entire narrative, as if reality did not predominate over unreality, the light over the dark, the straight line of Spirit over the mortal deviations and inverted images of the creator and His creation.
Deflection of being
Spiritually followed, the book of Genesis is the history of the untrue image of God, named a sinful mortal. This deflection of being, rightly viewed, serves to suggest the proper reflection of God and the spiritual actuality of man, as given in the first chapter of Genesis. Even thus the crude forms of human thought take on higher symbols and significations, when scientifically Christian views of the universe appear, illuminating time with the glory of eternity.
In the following exegesis, each text is followed by its spiritual interpretation according to the teachings of Christian Science.
EXEGESIS
Genesis i. 1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Ideas and identities
The infinite has no beginning. This word beginning is employed to signify the only, – that is, the eternal verity and unity of God and man, including the universe. The creative Principle–Life, Truth, and Love–is God. The universe reflects God. There is but one creator and one creation. This creation consists of the unfolding of spiritual ideas and their identities, which are embraced in the infinite Mind and forever reflected. These ideas range from the infinitesimal to infinity, and the highest ideas are the sons and daughters of God.
Genesis i. 2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Spiritual harmony
The divine Principle and idea constitute spiritual harmony,–heaven and eternity. In the universe of Truth, matter is unknown. No supposition of error enters there. Divine Science, the Word of God, saith to the darkness upon the face of error, “God is All-in-all,” and the light of ever-present Love illumines the universe. Hence the eternal wonder,–that infinite space is peopled with God’s ideas, reflecting Him in countless spiritual forms.
Genesis i. 3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Mind’s idea faultless
Immortal and divine Mind presents the idea of God: first, in light; second, in reflection; third, in spiritual and immortal forms of beauty and goodness. But this Mind creates no element nor symbol of discord and decay. God creates neither erring thought, mortal life, mutable truth, nor variable love.
Genesis i. 4. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
God, Spirit, dwelling in infinite light and harmony from which emanates the true idea, is never reflected by aught but the good.
Genesis i. 5. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Light preceding the sun
All questions as to the divine creation being both spiritual and material are answered in this passage, for though solar beams are not yet included in the record of creation, still there is light. This light is not from the sun nor from volcanic flames, but it is the revelation of Truth and of spiritual ideas. This also shows that there is no place where God’s light is not seen, since Truth, Life, and Love fill immensity and are ever-present. Was not this a revelation instead of a creation?
Evenings and mornings
The successive appearing of God’s ideas is represented as taking place on so many evenings and mornings, words which indicate, in the absence of solar time, spiritually clearer views of Him, views which are not implied by material darkness and dawn. Here we have the explanation of another passage of Scripture, that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years.” The rays of infinite Truth, when gathered into the focus of ideas, bring light instantaneously, whereas a thousand years of human doctrines, hypotheses, and vague conjectures emit no such effulgence.
Spirit versus darkness
Did infinite Mind create matter, and call it light? Spirit is light, and the contradiction of Spirit is matter, darkness, and darkness obscures light. Material sense is nothing but a supposition of the absence of Spirit. No solar rays nor planetary revolutions form the day of Spirit. Immortal Mind makes its own record, but mortal mind, sleep, dreams, sin, disease, and death have no record in the first chapter of Genesis.
Genesis i. 6. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
Spiritual firmament
Spiritual understanding, by which human conception, material sense, is separated from Truth, is the firmament. The divine Mind, not matter, creates all identities, and they are forms of Mind, the ideas of Spirit apparent only as Mind, never as mindless matter nor the so-called material senses.
Genesis i. 7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
Understanding imparted
Spirit imparts the understanding which uplifts consciousness and leads into all truth. The Psalmist saith: “The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.” Spiritual sense is the discernment of spiritual good. Understanding is the line of demarcation between the real and unreal. Spiritual understanding unfolds Mind,–Life, Truth, and Love,–and demonstrates the divine sense, giving the spiritual proof of the universe in Christian Science.
Original reflected
This understanding is not intellectual, is not the result of scholarly attainments; it is the reality of all things brought to light. God’s ideas reflect the immortal, unerring, and infinite. The mortal, erring, and finite are human beliefs, which apportion to themselves a task impossible for them, that of distinguishing between the false and the true. Objects utterly unlike the original do not reflect that original. Therefore matter, not being the reflection of Spirit, has no real entity. Understanding is a quality of God, a quality which separates Christian Science from supposition and makes Truth final.
Genesis i. 8. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Exalted thought
Through divine Science, Spirit, God, unites understanding to eternal harmony. The calm and exalted thought or spiritual apprehension is at peace. Thus the dawn of ideas goes on, forming each successive stage of progress.
Genesis i. 9. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
Unfolding of thoughts
Spirit, God, gathers unformed thoughts into their proper channels, and unfolds these thoughts, even as He opens the petals of a holy purpose in order that the purpose may appear.
Genesis i. 10. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas: and God saw that it was good.
Spirit names and blesses
Here the human concept and divine idea seem confused by the translator, but they are not so in the scientifically Christian meaning of the text. Upon Adam devolved the pleasurable task of finding names for all material things, but Adam has not yet appeared in the narrative. In metaphor, the dry land illustrates the absolute formations instituted by Mind, while water symbolizes the elements of Mind. Spirit duly feeds and clothes every object, as it appears in the line of spiritual creation, thus tenderly expressing the fatherhood and motherhood of God. Spirit names and blesses all. Without natures particularly defined, objects and subjects would be obscure, and creation would be full of nameless offspring,–wanderers from the parent Mind, strangers in a tangled wilderness.
Genesis i. 11. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
Divine propagation
The universe of Spirit reflects the creative power of the divine Principle, or Life, which reproduces the multitudinous forms of Mind and governs the multiplication of the compound idea man. The tree and herb do not yield fruit because of any propagating power of their own, but because they reflect the Mind which includes all. A material world implies a mortal mind and man a creator. The scientific divine creation declares immortal Mind and the universe created by God.
Ever-appearing creation
Infinite Mind creates and governs all, from the mental molecule to infinity. This divine Principle of all expresses Science and art throughout His creation, and the immortality of man and the universe. Creation is ever appearing, and must ever continue to appear from the nature of its inexhaustible source. Mortal sense inverts this appearing and calls ideas material. Thus misinterpreted, the divine idea seems to fall to the level of a human or material belief, called mortal man. But the seed is in itself, only as the divine Mind is All and reproduces all–as Mind is the multiplier, and Mind’s infinite idea, man and the universe, is the product. The only intelligence or substance of a thought, a seed, or a flower is God, the creator of it. Mind is the Soul of all. Mind is Life, Truth, and Love which governs all.
Genesis i. 12. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
Mind’s pure thought
God determines the gender of His own ideas. Gender is mental, not material. The seed within itself is the pure thought emanating from divine Mind. The feminine gender is not yet expressed in the text. Gender means simply kind or sort, and does not necessarily refer either to masculinity or femininity. The word is not confined to sexuality, and grammars always recognize a neuter gender, neither male nor female. The Mind or intelligence of production names the female gender last in the ascending order of creation. The intelligent individual idea, be it male or female, rising from the lesser to the greater, unfolds the infinitude of Love.
Genesis i. 13. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
Rising to the light
The third stage in the order of Christian Science is an important one to the human thought, letting in the light of spiritual understanding. This period corresponds to the resurrection, when Spirit is discerned to be the Life of all, and the deathless Life, or Mind, dependent upon no material organization. Our Master reappeared to his students,–to their apprehension he rose from the grave,–on the third day of his ascending thought, and so presented to them the certain sense of eternal Life.
Genesis i. 14. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven, to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.
Rarefaction of thought
Spirit creates no other than heavenly or celestial bodies, but the stellar universe is no more celestial than our earth. This text gives the idea of the rarefaction of thought as it ascends higher. God forms and peoples the universe. The light of spiritual understanding gives gleams of the infinite only, even as nebulae indicate the immensity of space.
Divine nature appearing
So-called mineral, vegetable, and animal substances are no more contingent now on time or material structure than they were when “the morning stars sang together.” Mind made the “plant of the field before it was in the earth.” The periods of spiritual ascension are the days and seasons of Mind’s creation, in which beauty, sublimity, purity, and holiness – yea, the divine nature – appear in man and the universe never to disappear.
Spiritual ideas apprehended
Knowing the Science of creation, in which all is Mind and its ideas, Jesus rebuked the material thought of his fellow-countrymen: “Ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” How much more should we seek to apprehend the spiritual ideas of God, than to dwell on the objects of sense! To discern the rhythm of Spirit and to be holy, thought must be purely spiritual.
Genesis i. 15. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven, to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
Truth and Love enlighten the understanding, in whose “light shall we see light;” and this illumination is reflected spiritually by all who walk in the light and turn away from a false material sense.
Genesis i. 16. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: He made the stars also.
Geology a failure
The sun is a metaphorical representation of Soul outside the body, giving existence and intelligence to the universe. Love alone can impart the limitless idea of infinite Mind. Geology has never explained the earth’s formations; it cannot explain them. There is no Scriptural allusion to solar light until time has been already divided into evening and morning; and the allusion to fluids (Genesis i. 2) indicates a supposed formation of matter by the resolving of fluids into solids, analogous to the suppositional resolving of thoughts into material things.
Spiritual subdivision
Light is a symbol of Mind, of Life, Truth, and Love, and not a vitalizing property of matter. Science reveals only one Mind, and this one shining by its own light and governing the universe, including man, in perfect harmony. This Mind forms ideas, its own images, subdivides and radiates their borrowed light, intelligence, and so explains the Scripture phrase, “whose seed is in itself.” Thus God’s ideas “multiply and replenish the earth.” The divine Mind supports the sublimity, magnitude, and infinitude of spiritual creation.
Genesis i. 17, 18. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
Darkness scattered
In divine Science, which is the seal of Deity and has the impress of heaven, God is revealed as infinite light. In the eternal Mind, no night is there.
Genesis i. 19. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
The changing glow and full effulgence of God’s infinite ideas, images, mark the periods of progress.
Genesis i. 20. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
Soaring aspirations
To mortal mind, the universe is liquid, solid, and a‰riform. Spiritually interpreted, rocks and mountains stand for solid and grand ideas. Animals and mortals metaphorically present the gradation of mortal thought, rising in the scale of intelligence, taking form in masculine, feminine, or neuter gender. The fowls, which fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven, correspond to aspirations soaring beyond and above corporeality to the understanding of the incorporeal and divine Principle, Love.
Genesis i. 21. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
Seraphic symbols
Spirit is symbolized by strength, presence, and power, and also by holy thoughts, winged with Love. These angels of His presence, which have the holiest charge, abound in the spiritual atmosphere of Mind, and consequently reproduce their own characteristics. Their individual forms we know not, but we do know that their natures are allied to God’s nature; and spiritual blessings, thus typified, are the externalized, yet subjective, states of faith and spiritual understanding.
Genesis i. 22. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas; and let fowl multiply in the earth.
Multiplication of pure ideas
Spirit blesses the multiplication of its own pure and perfect ideas. From the infinite elements of the one Mind emanate all form, color, quality, and quantity, and these are mental, both primarily and secondarily. Their spiritual nature is discerned only through the spiritual senses. Mortal mind inverts the true likeness, and confers animal names and natures upon its own misconceptions. Ignorant of the origin and operations of mortal mind,–that is, ignorant of itself,–this so-called mind puts forth its own qualities, and claims God as their author; albeit God is ignorant of the existence of both this mortal mentality, so-called, and its claim, for the claim usurps the deific prerogatives and is an attempted infringement on infinity.
Genesis i. 23. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
Spiritual spheres
Advancing spiritual steps in the teeming universe of Mind lead on to spiritual spheres and exalted beings. To material sense, this divine universe is dim and distant, gray in the sombre hues of twilight; but anon the veil is lifted, and the scene shifts into light. In the record, time is not yet measured by solar revolutions, and the motions and reflections of deific power cannot be apprehended until divine Science becomes the interpreter.
Genesis i. 24. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
Continuity of thoughts
Spirit diversifies, classifies, and individualizes all thoughts, which are as eternal as the Mind conceiving them; but the intelligence, existence, and continuity of all individuality remain in God, who is the divinely creative Principle thereof.
Genesis i. 25. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
God’s thoughts are spiritual realities
God creates all forms of reality. His thoughts are spiritual realities. So-called mortal mind – being nonexistent and consequently not within the range of immortal existence–could not by simulating deific power invert the divine creation, and afterwards recreate persons or things upon its own plane, since nothing exists beyond the range of all-inclusive infinity, in which and of which God is the sole creator. Mind, joyous in strength, dwells in the realm of Mind. Mind’s infinite ideas run and disport themselves. In humility they climb the heights of holiness.
Qualities of thought
Moral courage is “the lion of the tribe of Juda,” the king of the mental realm. Free and fearless it roams in the forest. Undisturbed it lies in the open field, or rests in “green pastures, . . . beside the still waters.” In the figurative transmission from the divine thought to the human, diligence, promptness, and perseverance are likened to “the cattle upon a thousand hills.” They carry the baggage of stern resolve, and keep pace with highest purpose. Tenderness accompanies all the might imparted by Spirit. The individuality created by God is not carnivorous, as witness the millennial estate pictured by Isaiah:
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, And the leopard shall lie down with the kid; And the calf and the young lion, and the fatling together; And a little child shall lead them.
Creatures of God useful
Understanding the control which Love held over all, Daniel felt safe in the lions’ den, and Paul proved the viper to be harmless. All of God’s creatures moving in the harmony of Science, are harmless, useful, indestructible. A realization of this grand verity was a source of strength to the ancient worthies.
It supports Christian healing, and enables its possessor to emulate the example of Jesus. “And God saw that it was good.”
The serpent harmless
Patience is symbolized by the tireless worm, creeping over lofty summits, persevering in its intent. The serpent of God’s creating is neither subtle nor poisonous, but is a wise idea, charming in its adroitness, for Love’s ideas are subject to the Mind which forms them,–the power which changeth the serpent into a staff.
Genesis i. 26. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
Elohistic plurality
The eternal Elohim includes the forever universe. The name Elohim is in the plural, but this plurality of Spirit does not imply more than one God, nor does it imply three persons in one. It relates to the oneness, the triunity of Life, Truth, and Love. “Let them have dominion.” Man is the family name for all ideas,–the sons and daughters of God. All that God imparts moves in accord with Him, reflecting goodness and power.
Reflected likeness
Your mirrored reflection is your own image or likeness. If you lift a weight, your reflection does this also. If you speak, the lips of this likeness move in accord with yours. Now compare man before the mirror to his divine Principle, God. Call the mirror divine Science, and call man the reflection. Then note how true, according to Christian Science, is the reflection to its original. As the reflection of yourself appears in the mirror, so you, being spiritual, are the reflection of God. The substance, Life, intelligence, Truth, and Love, which constitute Deity, are reflected by His creation; and when we subordinate the false testimony of the corporeal senses to the facts of Science, we shall see this true likeness and reflection everywhere.
Love imparts beauty
God fashions all things, after His own likeness. Life is reflected in existence, Truth in truthfulness, God in goodness, which impart their own peace and permanence. Love, redolent with unselfishness, bathes all in beauty and light. The grass beneath our feet silently exclaims, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” The modest arbutus sends her sweet breath to heaven. The great rock gives shadow and shelter. The sunlight glints from the church-dome, glances into the prison-cell, glides into the sick-chamber, brightens the flower, beautifies the landscape, blesses the earth. Man, made in His likeness, possesses and reflects God’s dominion over all the earth. Man and woman as coexistent and eternal with God forever reflect, in glorified quality, the infinite Father-Mother God.
Genesis i. 27. So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.
Ideal man and woman
To emphasize this momentous thought, it is repeated that God made man in His own image, to reflect the divine Spirit. It follows that man is a generic term. Masculine, feminine, and neuter genders are human concepts. In one of the ancient languages the word for man is used also as the synonym of mind. This definition has been weakened by anthropomorphism, or a humanization of Deity. The word anthropomorphic, in such a phrase as “an anthropomorphic God,” is derived from two Greek words, signifying man and form, and may be defined as a mortally mental attempt to reduce Deity to corporeality. The life-giving quality of Mind is Spirit, not matter. The ideal man corresponds to creation, to intelligence, and to Truth. The ideal woman corresponds to Life and to Love. In divine Science, we have not as much authority for considering God masculine, as we have for considering Him feminine, for Love imparts the clearest idea of Deity.
Divine personality
The world believes in many persons; but if God is personal, there is but one person, because there is but one God. His personality can only be reflected, not transmitted. God has countless ideas, and they all have one Principle and parentage. The only proper symbol of God as person is Mind’s infinite ideal. What is this ideal? Who shall behold it? This ideal
is God’s own image, spiritual and infinite. Even eternity can never reveal the whole of God, since there is no limit to infinitude or to its reflections.
Genesis i. 28. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Birthright of man
Divine Love blesses its own ideas, and causes them to multiply,–to manifest His power. Man is not made to till the soil. His birthright is dominion, not subjection. He is lord of the belief in earth and heaven,–himself subordinate alone to his Maker. This is the Science of being.
Genesis i. 29, 30. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
Assistance in brotherhood
God gives the lesser idea of Himself for a link to the greater, and in return, the higher always protects the lower. The rich in spirit help the poor in one grand brotherhood, all leaving the same Principle, or Father; and blessed is that man who seeth his brother’s need and supplieth it, seeking his own in another’s good. Love giveth to the least spiritual idea might, immortality, and goodness, which shine through all as the blossom shines through the bud. All the varied expressions of God reflect health, holiness, immortality infinite Life, Truth, and Love.
Genesis i. 31. And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Perfection of creation
The divine Principle, or Spirit, comprehends and expresses all, and all must therefore be as perfect is the divine Principle is perfect. Nothing is new to Spirit.
Nothing can be novel to eternal Mind, the author of all things, who from all eternity knoweth His own ideas. Deity was satisfied with His work. How could He be otherwise, since the spiritual creation was the outgrowth, the emanation, of His infinite selfcontainment and immortal wisdom?
Genesis ii. 1. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
Infinity measureless
Thus the ideas of God in universal being are complete and forever expressed, for Science reveals infinity and the fatherhood and motherhood of Love. Human capacity is slow to discern and to grasp God’s creation and the divine power and presence which go with it, demonstrating its spiritual origin. Mortals can never know the infinite, until they throw off the old man and reach the spiritual image and likeness. What can fathom infinity! How shall we declare Him, till, in the language of the apostle, “we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ”?
Genesis ii. 2. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made.
Resting in holy work
God rests in action. Imparting has not impoverished, can never impoverish, the divine Mind. No exhaustion follows the action of this Mind, according to the apprehension of divine Science. The highest and sweetest rest, even from a human standpoint, is in holy work.
Love and man coexistent
Unfathomable Mind is expressed. The depth, breadth, height, might, majesty, and glory of infinite Love fill all space. That is enough! Human language can repeat only an infinitesimal part of what exists. The absolute ideal, man, is no more seen nor comprehended by mortals, than is His infinite Principle, Love. Principle and its idea, man, are coexistent and eternal. The numerals of infinity, called seven days, can never be reckoned according to the calendar of time. These days will appear as mortality disappears, and they will reveal eternity, newness of Life, in which all sense of error forever disappears and thought accepts the divine infinite calculus.
Genesis ii. 4, 5. These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God [Jehovah] made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God [Jehovah] had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
Growth is from Mind
Here is the emphatic declaration that God creates all through Mind, not through matter,–that the plant grows, not because of seed or soil, but because growth is the eternal mandate of Mind. Mortal thought drops into the ground, but the immortal creating thought is from above, not from beneath. Because Mind makes all, there is nothing left to be made by a lower power. Spirit acts through the Science of Mind, never causing man to till the ground, but making him superior to the soil. Knowledge of this lifts man above the sod, above earth and its environments, to conscious spiritual harmony and eternal being.
Spiritual narrative
Here the inspired record closes its narrative of being that is without beginning or end. All that is made is the work of God, and all is good. We leave this brief, glorious history of spiritual creation (as stated in the first chapter of Genesis) in the hands of God, not of man, in the keeping of Spirit, not matter, joyfully acknowledging now and forever God’s supremacy, omnipotence, and omnipresence.
The harmony and immortality of man are intact. We should look away from the opposite supposition that man is created materially, and turn our gaze to the spiritual record of creation, to that which should be engraved on the understanding and heart “with the point of a diamond” and the pen of an angel.
The reader will naturally ask if there is nothing more about creation in the book of Genesis. Indeed there is, but the continued account is mortal and material.
Genesis ii. 6. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
The story of error
The Science and truth of the divine creation have been presented in the verses already considered, and now the opposite error, a material view of creation, is to be set forth. The second chapter of Genesis contains a statement of this material view of God and the universe, a statement which is the exact opposite of scientific truth as before recorded. The history of error or matter, if veritable, would set aside the omnipotence of Spirit; but it is the false history in contradistinction to the true.
The two records
The Science of the first record proves the falsity of the second. If one is true, the other is false, for they are antagonistic. The first record assigns all might and government to God, and endows man out of God’s perfection and power. The second record chronicles man as mutable and mortal, – as having broken away from Deity and as revolving in an orbit of his own. Existence, separate from divinity, Science explains as impossible.
This second record unmistakably gives the history of error in its externalized forms, called life and intelligence in matter. It records pantheism, opposed to the supremacy of divine Spirit; but this state of things is declared to be temporary and this man to be mortal, dust returning to dust.
Erroneous representation
In this erroneous theory, matter takes the place of Spirit. Matter is represented as the life-giving principle of the earth. Spirit is represented as entering matter in order to create man. God’s glowing denunciations of man when not found in His image, the likeness of Spirit, convince reason and coincide with revelation in declaring this material creation false.
Hypothetical reversal
This latter part of the second chapter of Genesis, which portrays Spirit as supposedly cooperating with matter in constructing the universe, is based on some hypothesis of error, for the Scripture just preceding declares God’s work to be finished. Does Life, Truth, and Love produce death, error, and hatred? Does the creator condemn His own creation? Does the unerring Principle of divine law change or repent? It can not be so. Yet one might so judge from an unintelligent perusal of the Scriptural account now under comment.
Mist, or false claim
Because of its false basis, the mist of obscurity evolved by error deepens the false claim, and finally declares that God knows error and that error can improve His creation. Although presenting the exact opposite of Truth, the lie claims to be truth. The creations of matter arise from a mist or false claim, or from mystification, and not from the firmament, or understanding, which God erects between the true and false. In error everything comes from beneath, not from above. All is material myth, instead of the reflection of Spirit.
Distinct documents
It may be worth while here to remark that, according to the best scholars, there are clear evidences of two distinct documents in the early part of the book of Genesis. One is called the Elohistic, because the Supreme Being is therein called Elohim. The other document is called the Jehovistic, because Deity therein is always called Jehovah,–or Lord God, as our common version translates it.
Jehovah or Elohim
Throughout the first chapter of Genesis and in three verses of the second,–in what we understand to be the spiritually scientific account of creation,–it is Elohim (God) who creates. From the fourth verse of chapter two to chapter five, the creator is called Jehovah, or the Lord. The different accounts become more and more closely intertwined to the end of chapter twelve, after which the distinction is not definitely traceable. In the historic parts of the Old Testament, it is usually Jehovah, peculiarly the divine sovereign of the Hebrew people, who is referred to.
Gods of the heathen
The idolatry which followed this material mythology is seen in the Phoenician worship of Baal, in the Moabitish god Chemosh, in the Moloch of the Amorites, in the Hindoo Vishnu, in the Greek Aphrodite, and in a thousand other so-called deities.
Jehovah a tribal deity
It was also found among the Israelites, who constantly went after “strange gods.” They called the Supreme Being by the national name of Jehovah. In that name of Jehovah, the true idea of God seems almost lost. God becomes “a man of war,” a tribal god to be worshipped, rather than Love, the divine Principle to be lived and loved.
Genesis ii. 7. And the Lord God [Jehovah] formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Creation reversed
Did the divine and infinite Principle become a finite deity, that he should now be called Jehovah? With a single command, Mind had made man, both male and female. How then could a material organization become the basis of man? How could the non-intelligent become the medium of Mind, and error be the enunciator of Truth? Matter is not the reflection of Spirit, yet God is reflected in all His creation. Is this addition to His creation real or unreal? Is it the truth, or is it a lie concerning man and God?
It must be a lie, for God presently curses the ground. Could Spirit evolve its opposite, matter, and give matter ability to sin and suffer? Is Spirit, God, injected into dust, and eventually ejected at the demand of matter? Does Spirit enter dust, and lose therein the divine nature and omnipotence? Does Mind, God, enter matter to become there a mortal sinner, animated by the breath of God? In this narrative, the validity of matter is opposed, not the validity of Spirit or Spirit’s creations. Man reflects God; mankind represents the Adamic race, and is a human, not a divine, creation.
Definitions of man
The following are some of the equivalents of the term man in different languages. In the Saxon, mankind, a woman, any one; in the Welsh, that which rises up,–the primary sense being image, form; in the Hebrew, image, similitude; in the Icelandic, mind. The following translation is from the Icelandic:
And God said, Let us make man after our mind and our likeness; and God shaped man after His mind; after God’s mind shaped He Him; and He shaped them male and female.
No baneful creation
In the Gospel of John, it is declared that all things were made through the Word of God, “and without Him [the logos, or word] was not anything made that was made.” Everything good or worthy, God made. Whatever is valueless or baneful, He did not make,–hence its unreality. In the Science of Genesis we read that He saw everything which He had made, “and, behold, it was very good.” The corporeal senses declare otherwise; and if we give the same heed to the history of error as to the records of truth, the Scriptural record of sin and death favors the false conclusion of the material senses. Sin, sickness, and death must be deemed as devoid of reality as they are of good, God.
Genesis ii. 9. And out of the ground made the Lord God [Jehovah] to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also, in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Contradicting first creation
The previous and more scientific record of creation declares that God made “every plant of the field before it was in the earth.” This opposite declaration, this statement that life issues from matter, contradicts the teaching of the first chapter,–namely, that all Life is God. Belief is less than understanding. Belief involves theories of material hearing, sight, touch, taste, and smell, termed the five senses. The appetites and passions, sin, sickness, and death, follow in the train of this error of a belief in intelligent matter.
Record of error
The first mention of evil is in the legendary Scriptural text in the second chapter of Genesis. God pronounced good all that He created, and the Scriptures declare that He created all. The “tree of life” stands for the idea of Truth, and the sword which guards it is the type of divine Science. The “tree of knowledge” stands for the erroneous doctrine that the knowledge of evil is as real, hence as God-bestowed, as the knowledge of good. Was evil instituted through God, Love? Did He create this fruit-bearer of sin in contradiction of the first creation? This second biblical account is a picture of error throughout.
Genesis ii. 15. And the Lord God [Jehovah] took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it and to keep it.
Garden of Eden
The name Eden, according to Cruden, means pleasure, delight. In this text Eden stands for the mortal, material body. God could not put Mind into matter nor infinite Spirit into finite form to dress it and keep it,–to make it beautiful or to cause it to live and grow. Man is God’s reflection, needing no cultivation, but ever beautiful and complete.
Genesis ii. 16, 17. And the Lord God [Jehovah] commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
No temptation from God
Here the metaphor represents God, Love, as tempting man, but the Apostle James says: “God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth He any man.” It is true that a knowledge of evil would make man mortal. It is plain also that material perception, gathered from the corporeal senses, constitutes evil and mortal knowledge. But is it true that God, good, made “the tree of life” to be the tree of death to His own creation? Has evil the reality of good? Evil is unreal because it is a lie,–false in every statement.
Genesis ii. 19. And out of the ground the Lord God [Jehovah] formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
Creation’s counterfeit
Here the lie represents God as repeating creation, but doing so materially, not spiritually, and asking a prospective sinner to help Him. Is the Supreme Being retrograding, and is man giving up his dignity? Was it requisite for the formation of man that dust should become sentient, when all being is the reflection of the eternal Mind, and the record declares that God has already created man, both male and female? That Adam gave the name and nature of animals, is solely mythological and material. It cannot be true that man was ordered to create man anew in partnership with God; this supposition was a dream, a myth.
Genesis ii. 21, 22. And the Lord God [Jehovah, Yawah] caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God [Jehovah] had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man.
Hypnotic surgery
Here falsity, error, credits Truth, God, with inducing a sleep or hypnotic state in Adam in order to perform a surgical operation on him and thereby create woman. This is the first record of magnetism. Beginning creation with darkness instead of light, – materially rather than spiritually, – error now simulates the work of Truth, mocking Love and declaring what great things error has done. Beholding the creations of his own dream and calling them real and God-given, Adam–alias error–gives them names. Afterwards he is supposed to become the basis of the creation of woman and of his own kind, calling them mankind,–that is, a kind of man.
Mental midwifery
But according to this narrative, surgery was first performed mentally and without instruments; and this may be a useful hint to the medical faculty. Later in human history, when the forbidden fruit was bringing forth fruit of its own kind, there came a suggestion of change in the modus operandi, that man should be born of woman, not woman again taken from man. It came about, also, that instruments were needed to assist the birth of mortals. The first system of suggestive obstetrics has changed. Another change will come as to the nature and origin of man, and this revelation will destroy the dream of existence, reinstate reality, usher in Science and the glorious fact of creation, that both man and woman proceed from God and are His eternal children, belonging to no lesser parent.
Genesis iii. 1-3. Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God [Jehovah] had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
Mythical serpent
Whence comes a talking, lying serpent to tempt the children of divine Love? The serpent enters into the metaphor only as evil. We have nothing in the animal kingdom which represents the species described,–a talking serpent,–and should rejoice that evil, by whatever figure presented, contradicts itself and has neither origin nor support in Truth and good. Seeing this, we should have faith to fight all claims of evil, because we know that they are worthless and unreal.
Error or Adam
Adam, the synonym for error, stands for a belief of material mind. He begins his reign over man some what mildly, but he increases in falsehood and his days become shorter. In this development, the immortal, spiritual law of Truth is made manifest as forever opposed to mortal, material sense.
Divine providence
In divine Science, man is sustained by God, the divine Principle of being. The earth, at God’s command, brings forth food for man’s use. Knowing this, Jesus once said, “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink,”–presuming not on the prerogative of his creator, but recognizing God, the Father and Mother of all, as able to feed and clothe man as He doth the lilies.
Genesis iii. 4, 5. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened; and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
Error’s assumption
This myth represents error as always asserting its superiority over truth, giving the lie to divine Science and saying, through the material senses: “I can open your eyes. I can do what God has not done for you. Bow down to me and have another god. Only admit that I am real, that sin and sense are more pleasant to the eyes than spiritual Life, more to be desired than Truth, and I shall know you, and you will be mine.” Thus Spirit and flesh war.
Scriptural allegory
The history of error is a dream-narrative. The dream has no reality, no intelligence, no mind; therefore the dreamer and dream are one, for neither is true nor real. First, this narrative supposes that something springs from nothing, that matter precedes mind. Second, it supposes that mind enters matter, and matter becomes living, substantial, and intelligent. The order of this allegory–the belief that everything springs from dust instead of from Deity – has been maintained in all the subsequent forms of belief. This is the error, – that mortal man starts materially, that nonintelligence becomes intelligence, that mind and soul are both right and wrong.
Higher hope
It is well that the upper portions of the brain represent the higher moral sentiments, as if hope were ever prophesying thus: The human mind will sometime rise above all material and physical sense, exchanging it for spiritual perception, and exchanging human concepts for the divine consciousness. Then man will recognize his God-given dominion and being.
Biological inventions
If, in the beginning, man’s body originated in nonintelligent dust, and mind was afterwards put into body by the creator, why is not this divine order still maintained by God in perpetuating the species? Who will say that minerals, vegetables, and animals have a propagating property of their own? Who dares to say either that God is in matter or that matter exists without God? Has man sought out other creative inventions, and so changed the method of his Maker?
Which institutes Life,–matter or Mind? Does Life begin with Mind or with matter? Is Life sustained by matter or by Spirit? Certainly not by both, since flesh wars against Spirit and the corporeal senses can take no cognizance of Spirit. The mythologic theory of material life at no point resembles the scientifically Christian record of man as created by Mind in the image and likeness of God and having dominion over all the earth. Did God at first create one man unaided, – that is, Adam, but afterwards require the union of the two sexes in order to create the rest of the human family? No! God makes and governs all.
Progeny cursed
All human knowledge and material sense must be gained from the five corporeal senses. Is this knowledge safe, when eating its first fruits brought death? “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,” was the prediction in the story under consideration. Adam and his progeny were cursed, not blessed; and this indicates that the divine Spirit, or Father, condemns material man and remands him to dust.
Genesis iii. 9, 10. And the Lord God [Jehovah] called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
Shame the effect of sin
Knowledge and pleasure, evolved through material sense, produced the immediate fruits of fear and shame. Ashamed before Truth, error shrank abashed from the divine voice calling out to the corporeal senses. Its summons may be thus paraphrased: “Where art thou, man? Is Mind in matter? Is Mind capable of error as well as of truth, of evil as well as of good, when God is All and He is Mind and there is but one God, hence one Mind?”
Fear comes of error
Fear was the first manifestation of the error of material sense. Thus error began and will end the dream of matter, In the allegory the body had been naked, and Adam knew it not; but now error demands that mind shall see and feel through matter, the five senses. The first impression material man had of himself was one of nakedness and shame. Had he lost man’s rich inheritance and God’s behest, dominion over all the earth? No! This had never been bestowed on Adam.
Genesis iii. 11, 12. And He said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat? And the man said, The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
The beguiling first lie
Here there is an attempt to trace all human errors directly or indirectly to God, or good, as if He were the creator of evil. The allegory shows that the snake-talker utters the first voluble lie, which beguiles the woman and demoralizes the man. Adam, alias mortal error, charges God and woman with his own dereliction, saying, “The woman, whom Thou gavest me, is responsible.” According to this belief, the rib taken from Adam’s side has grown into an evil mind, named woman, who aids man to make sinners more rapidly than he can alone. Is this an help meet for man?
Materiality, so obnoxious to God, is already found in the rapid deterioration of the bone and flesh which came from Adam to form Eve. The belief in material life and intelligence is growing worse at every step, but error has its suppositional day and multiplies until the end thereof.
False womanhood
Truth, cross-questioning man as to His knowledge of error, finds woman the first to confess her fault. She says, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat;” as much as to say in meek penitence, “Neither man nor God shall father my fault.” She has already learned that corporeal sense is the serpent. Hence she is first to abandon the belief in the material origin of man and to discern spiritual creation. This hereafter enabled woman to be the mother of Jesus and to behold at the sepulchre the risen Saviour, who was soon to manifest the deathless man of God’s creating. This enabled woman to be first to interpret the Scriptures in their true sense, which reveals the spiritual origin of man.
Genesis iii. 14, 15. And the Lord God [Jehovah] said unto the serpent, . . . I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Spirit and flesh
This prophecy has been fulfilled. The Son of the Virginmother unfolded the remedy for Adam, or error; and the Apostle Paul explains this warfare between the idea of divine power, which Jesus presented, and mythological material intelligence called energy and opposed to Spirit.
Paul says in his epistle to the Romans: “The carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the spirit of God dwell in you.”
Bruising sin’s head
There will be greater mental opposition to the spiritual, scientific meaning of the Scriptures than there has ever been since the Christian era began. The serpent, material sense, will bite the heel of the woman,–will struggle to destroy the spiritual idea of Love; and the woman, this idea, will bruise the head of lust. The spiritual idea has given the understanding a foothold in Christian Science. The seed of Truth and the seed of error, of belief and of understanding,–yea, the seed of Spirit and the seed of matter,–are the wheat and tares which time will separate, the one to be burned, the other to be garnered into heavenly places.
Genesis iii. 16. Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception: in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Judgment on error
Divine Science deals its chief blow at the supposed material foundations of life and intelligence. It dooms idolatry. A belief in other gods, other creators, and other creations must go down before Christian Science. It unveils the results of sin as shown in sickness and death. When will man pass through the open gate of Christian Science into the heaven of Soul, into the heritage of the first born among men? Truth is indeed ” the way.”
Genesis iii. 17-19. And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life: thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field: in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
New earth and no more sea
In the first chapter of Genesis we read: “And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas.” In the Apocalypse it is written: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.” In St. John’s vision, heaven and earth stand for spiritual ideas, and the sea, as a symbol of tempest-tossed human concepts advancing and receding, is represented as having passed away. The divine understanding reigns, is all and there is no other consciousness.
The fall of error
The way of error is awful to contemplate. The illusion of sin is without hope or God. If man’s spiritual gravitation and attraction to one Father, in whom we “live, and move, and have our being,” should be lost, and if man should be governed by corporeality instead of divine Principle, by body instead of by Soul, man would be annihilated. Created by flesh instead of by Spirit, starting from matter instead of from God, mortal man would be governed by himself. The blind leading the blind, both would fall.
True attainment
Passions and appetites must end in pain. They are “of few days, and full of trouble.” Their supposed joys are cheats. Their narrow limits belittle their gratifications, and hedge about their achievements with thorns.
Mortal mind accepts the erroneous, material conception of life and joy, but the true idea is gained from the immortal side. Through toil, struggle, and sorrow, what do mortals attain? They give up their belief in perishable life and happiness; the mortal and material return to dust, and the immortal is reached.
Genesis iii. 22-24. And the Lord God [Jehovah] said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever; therefore the Lord God [Jehovah] sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So He drove out the man: and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
Justice and recompense
A knowledge of evil was never the essence of divinity or manhood. In the first chapter of Genesis, evil has no local habitation nor name. Creation is there represented as spiritual, entire, and good. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Error excludes itself from harmony. Sin is its own punishment. Truth guards the gateway to harmony. Error tills its own barren soil and buries itself in the ground, since ground and dust stand for nothingness.
Inspired interpretation
No one can reasonably doubt that the purpose of this allegory–this second account in Genesis–is to depict the falsity of error and the effects of error. Subsequent Bible revelation is coordinate with the Science of creation recorded in the first chapter of Genesis. Inspired writers interpret the Word spiritually, while the ordinary historian interprets it literally. Literally taken, the text is made to appear contradictory in some places, and divine Love, which blessed the earth and gave it to man for a possession, is represented as changeable. The literal meaning would imply that God withheld from man the opportunity to reform, lest man should improve it and become better; but this is not the nature of God, who is Love always, Love infinitely wise and altogether lovely, who “seeketh not her own.”
Spiritual gateway
Truth should, and does, drive error out of all selfhood. Truth is a two-edged sword, guarding and guiding. Truth places the cherub wisdom at the gate of understanding to note the proper guests. Radiant with mercy and justice, the sword of Truth gleams afar and indicates the infinite distance between Truth and error, between the material and spiritual, the unreal and the real.
Contrasted testimony
The sun, giving light and heat to the earth, is a figure of divine Life and Love, enlightening and sustaining the universe. The “tree of life” is significant of eternal reality or being. The “tree of knowledge” typifies unreality. The testimony of the serpent is significant of the illusion of error, of the false claims that misrepresent God, good. Sin, sickness, and death have no record in the Elohistic introduction of Genesis, in which God creates the heavens, earth, and man. Until that which contradicts the truth of being enters into the arena, evil has no history, and evil is brought into view only as the unreal in contradistinction to the real and eternal.
Genesis iv. 1. And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord [Jehovah].
Erroneous conception
This account is given, not of immortal man, but of mortal man, and of sin which is temporal. As both mortal man and sin have a beginning, they must consequently have an end, while the sinless, real man is eternal. Eve’s declaration, “I have gotten a man from the Lord,” supposes God to be the author of sin and sin’s progeny. This false sense of existence is fratricidal. In the words of Jesus, it (evil, devil) is “a murderer from the beginning.” Error begins by reckoning life as separate from Spirit, thus sapping the foundations of immortality, as if life and immortality were something which matter can both give and take away.
Only one standard
What can be the standard of good, of Spirit, of Life, or of Truth, if they produce their opposites, such as evil, matter, error, and death? God could never impart an element of evil, and man possesses nothing which he has not derived from God. How then has man a basis for wrong-doing? Whence does he obtain the propensity or power to do evil? Has Spirit resigned to matter the government of the universe?
A type of falsehood
The Scriptures declare that God condemned this lie as to man’s origin and character by condemning its symbol, the serpent, to grovel beneath all the beasts of the field. It is false to say that Truth and error commingle in creation. In parable and argument, this falsity is exposed by our Master as self-evidently wrong. Disputing these points with the Pharisees and arguing for the Science of creation, Jesus said: “Do men gather grapes of thorns?” Paul asked: “What communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?”
Scientific offspring
The divine origin of Jesus gave him more than human power to expound the facts of creation, and demonstrate the one Mind which makes and governs man and the universe. The Science of creation, so conspicuous in the birth of Jesus inspired his wisest and least-understood sayings, and was the basis of his marvellous demonstrations. Christ is the offspring of Spirit, and spiritual existence shows that Spirit creates neither a wicked nor a mortal man, lapsing into sin, sickness, and death.
Cleansing upheaval
In Isaiah we read: “I make peace, and create evil. I the Lord do all these things;” but the prophet referred to divine law as stirring up the belief in evil to its utmost, when bringing it to the surface and reducing it to its common denominator, nothingness. The muddy river-bed must be stirred in order to purify the stream. In moral chemicalization, when the symptoms of evil, illusion, are aggravated, we may think in our ignorance that the Lord hath wrought an evil; but we ought to know that God’s law uncovers so-called sin and its effects, only that Truth may annihilate all sense of evil and all power to sin.
Allegiance to Spirit
Science renders “unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” It saith to the human sense of sin, sickness, and death, “God never made you, and you are a false sense which hath no knowledge of God.” The purpose of the Hebrew allegory, representing error as assuming a divine character, is to teach mortals never to believe a lie.
Genesis iv. 3, 4. Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord [Jehovah]. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof.
Spiritual and material
Cain is the type of mortal and material man, conceived in sin and “shapen in iniquity;” he is not the type of Truth and Love. Material in origin and sense, he brings a material offering to God. Abel takes his offering from the firstlings of the flock. A lamb is a more animate form of existence, and more nearly resembles a mind-offering than does Cain’s fruit. Jealous of his brother’s gift, Cain seeks Abel’s life, instead of making his own gift a higher tribute to the Most High.
Genesis iv. 4, 5. And the Lord [Jehovah] had respect unto Abel, and to his offering: but unto Cain, and to his offering, He had not respect.
Had God more respect for the homage bestowed through a gentle animal than for the worship expressed by Cain’s fruit? No; but the lamb was a more spiritual type of even the human concept of Love than the herbs of the ground could be.
Genesis iv. 8. Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
The erroneous belief that life, substance, and intelligence can be material ruptures the life and brotherhood of man at the very outset.
Genesis iv. 9. And the Lord [Jehovah] said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?
Brotherhood repudiated
Here the serpentine lie invents new forms. At first it usurps divine power. It is supposed to say in the first instance, “Ye shall be as gods.” Now it repudiates even the human duty of man towards his brother.
Genesis iv. 10, 11. And He [Jehovah] said, . . . The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth.
Murder brings its curse
The belief of life in matter sins at every step. It incurs divine displeasure, and it would kill Jesus that it might be rid of troublesome Truth. Material beliefs would slay the spiritual idea whenever and wherever it appears. Though error hides behind a lie and excuses guilt, error cannot forever be concealed. Truth, through her eternal laws, unveils error. Truth causes sin to betray itself, and sets upon error the mark of the beast. Even the disposition to excuse guilt or to conceal it is punished. The avoidance of justice and the denial of truth tend to perpetuate sin, invoke crime, jeopardize self-control, and mock divine mercy.
Genesis iv. 15. And the Lord [Jehovah] said unto him Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord [Jehovah] set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.
Retribution and remorse
“They that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Let Truth uncover and destroy error in God’s own way, and let human justice pattern the divine. Sin will receive its full penalty, both for what it is and for what it does. Justice marks the sinner, and teaches mortals not to remove the waymarks of God. To envy’s own hell, justice consigns the lie which, to advance itself, breaks God’s commandments.
Genesis iv. 16. And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord [Jehovah], and dwelt in the land of Nod.
Climax of suffering
The sinful misconception of Life as something less than God, having no truth to support it, falls back upon itself. This error, after reaching the climax of suffering, yields to Truth and returns to dust; but it is only mortal man and not the real man, who dies. The image of Spirit cannot be effaced, since it is the idea of Truth and changes not, but becomes more beautifully apparent at error’s demise.
Dwelling in dreamland
In divine Science, the material man is shut out from the presence of God. The five corporeal senses cannot take cognizance of Spirit. They cannot come into His presence, and must dwell in dreamland, until mortals arrive at the understanding that material life, with all its sin, sickness, and death, is an illusion, against which divine Science is engaged in a warfare of extermination. The great verities of existence are never excluded by falsity.
Man springs from Mind
All error proceeds from the evidence before the material senses. If man is material and originates in an egg, who shall say that he is not primarily dust? May not Darwin be right in thinking that apehood preceded mortal manhood? Minerals and vegetables are found, according to divine Science, to be the creations of erroneous thought, not of matter. Did man, whom God created with a word, originate in an egg? When Spirit made all, did it leave aught for matter to create? Ideas of Truth alone are reflected in the myriad manifestations of Life, and thus it is seen that man springs solely from Mind. The belief that matter supports life would make Life, or God, mortal.
Material inception
The text, “In the day that the Lord God [Jehovah God] made the earth and the heavens,” introduces the record of a material creation which followed the spiritual, – a creation so wholly apart from God’s, that Spirit had no participation in it. In God’s creation ideas became productive, obedient to Mind. There was no rain and “not a man to till the ground.” Mind, instead of matter, being the producer, Life was self-sustained. Birth, decay, and death arise from the material sense of things, not from the spiritual, for in the latter Life consisteth not of the things which a man eateth. Matter cannot change the eternal fact that man exists because God exists. Nothing is new to the infinite Mind.
First evil suggestion
In Science, Mind neither produces matter nor does matter produce mind. No mortal mind has the might or right or wisdom to create or to destroy. All is under the control of the one Mind, even God. The first statement about evil,–the first suggestion of more than the one Mind,–is in the fable of the serpent. The facts of creation, as previously recorded, include nothing of the kind.
Material personality
The serpent is supposed to say, “Ye shall be as gods,” but these gods must be evolved from materiality and be the very antipodes of immortal and spiritual being. Man is the likeness of Spirit, but a material personality is not this likeness. Therefore man, in this allegory, is neither a lesser god nor the image and likeness of the one God.
Material, erroneous belief reverses understanding and truth. It declares mind to be in and of matter, so-called mortal life to be Life, infinity to enter man’s nostrils so that matter becomes spiritual. Error begins with corporeality as the producer instead of divine Principle, and explains Deity through mortal and finite conceptions.
“Behold, the man is become as one of us.” This could not be the utterance of Truth or Science, for according to the record, material man was fast degenerating and never had been divinely conceived.
Mental tillage
The condemnation of mortals to till the ground means this,–that mortals should so improve material belief by thought tending spiritually upward as to destroy materiality. Man, created by God, was given dominion over the whole earth. The notion of a material universe is utterly opposed to the theory of man as evolved from Mind. Such fundamental errors send falsity into all human doctrines and conclusions, and do not accord infinity to Deity. Error tills the whole ground in this material theory, which is entirely a false view, destructive to existence and happiness. Outside of Christian Science all is vague and hypothetical, the opposite of Truth; yet this opposite, in its false view of God and man, impudently demands a blessing.
Erroneous standpoint
The translators of this record of scientific creation entertained a false sense of being. They believed in the existence of matter, its propagation and power. From that standpoint of error, they could not apprehend the nature and operation of Spirit. Hence the seeming contradiction in that Scripture, which is so glorious in its spiritual signification. Truth has but one reply to all error,–to sin, sickness, and death: “Dust [nothingness] thou art, and unto dust [nothingness] shalt thou return.”
Mortality mythical
“As in Adam [error] all die, even so in Christ [Truth] shall all be made alive.” The mortality of man is a myth, for man is immortal. The false belief that spirit is now submerged in matter, at some future time to be emancipated from it,–this belief alone is mortal. Spirit, God, never germinates, but is “the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever.” If Mind, God, creates error, that error must exist in the divine Mind, and this assumption of error would dethrone the perfection of Deity.
No truth from a material basis
Is Christian Science contradictory? Is the divine Principle of creation misstated? Has God no Science to declare Mind, while matter is governed by unerring intelligence? “There went up a mist from the earth.” This represents error as starting from an idea of good on a material basis. It supposes God and man to be manifested only through the corporeal senses, although the material senses can take no cognizance of Spirit or the spiritual idea.
Genesis and the Apocalypse seem more obscure than other portions of the Scripture, because they cannot possibly be interpreted from a material standpoint. To the author, they are transparent, for they contain the deep divinity of the Bible.
Dawning of spiritual facts
Christian Science is dawning upon a material age. The great spiritual facts of being, like rays of light, shine in the darkness, though the darkness, comprehending them not, may deny their reality. The proof that the system stated in this book is Christianly scientific resides in the good this system accomplishes, for it cures on a divine demonstrable Principle which all may understand.
Proof given in healing
If mathematics should present a thousand different examples of one rule, the proving of one example would authenticate all the others. A simple statement of Christian Science, if demonstrated by healing, contains the proof of all here said of Christian Science. If one of the statements in this book is true, every one must be true, for not one departs from the stated system and rule. You can prove for yourself, dear reader, the Science of healing, and so ascertain if the author has given you the correct interpretation of Scripture.
Embryonic evolution
The late Louis Agassiz, by his microscopic examination of a vulture’s ovum, strengthens the thinker’s conclusions as to the scientific theory of creation. Agassiz was able to see in the egg the earth’s atmosphere, the gathering clouds, the moon and stars, while the germinating speck of so-called embryonic life seemed a small sun. In its history of mortality, Darwin’s theory of evolution from a material basis is more consistent than most theories. Briefly, this is Darwin’s theory,–that Mind produces its opposite, matter, and endues matter with power to recreate the universe, including man. Material evolution implies that the great First Cause must become material, and afterwards must either return to Mind or go down into dust and nothingness.
True theory of the universe
The Scriptures are very sacred. Our aim must be to have them understood spiritually, for only by this understanding can truth be gained. The true theory of the universe, including man, is not in material history but in spiritual development. Inspired thought relinquishes a material, sensual, and mortal theory of the universe, and adopts the spiritual and immortal.
Scriptural perception
It is this spiritual perception of Scripture, which lifts humanity out of disease and death and inspires faith.
“The Spirit and the bride say, Come! . . . and whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” Christian Science separates error from truth, and breathes through the sacred pages the spiritual sense of life, substance, and intelligence. In this Science, we discover man in the image and likeness of God. We see that man has never lost his spiritual estate and his eternal harmony.
The clouds dissolving
How little light or heat reach our earth when clouds cover the sun’s face! So Christian Science can be seen only as the clouds of corporeal sense roll away. Earth has little light or joy for mortals before Life is spiritually learned. Every agony of mortal error helps error to destroy error, and so aids the apprehension of immortal Truth. This is the new birth going on hourly, by which men may entertain angels, the true ideas of God, the spiritual sense of being.
Prediction of a naturalist
Speaking of the origin of mortals, a famous naturalist says: “It is very possible that many general statements now current, about birth and generation, will be changed with the progress of information.” Had the naturalist, through his tireless researches, gained the diviner side in Christian Science,–so far apart from his material sense of animal growth and organization, he would have blessed the human race more abundantly.
Methods of reproduction
Natural history is richly endowed by the labors and genius of great men. Modern discoveries have brought to light important facts in regard to so-called embryonic life. Agassiz declares (“Methods of Study in Natural History,” page 275): “Certain animals, besides the ordinary process of generation, also increase their numbers naturally and constantly by self division.” This discovery is corroborative of the Science of Mind, for this discovery shows that the multiplication of certain animals takes place apart from sexual conditions. The supposition that life germinates in eggs and must decay after it has grown to maturity, if not before, is shown by divine metaphysics to be a mistake,–a blunder which will finally give place to higher theories and demonstrations.
The three processes
Creatures of lower forms of organism are supposed to have, as classes, three different methods of reproduction and to multiply their species sometimes through eggs, sometimes through buds, and sometimes through self-division. According to recent lore, successive generations do not begin with the birth of new individuals, or personalities, but with the formation of the nucleus, or egg, from which one or more individualities subsequently emerge; and we must therefore look upon the simple ovum as the germ, the starting-point, of the most complicated corporeal structures, including those which we call human. Here these material researches culminate in such vague hypotheses as must necessarily attend false systems, which rely upon physics and are devoid of metaphysics.
Deference to material law
In one instance a celebrated naturalist, Agassiz, discovers the pathway leading to divine Science, and beards the lion of materialism in its den. At that point, however, even this great observer mistakes nature, forsakes Spirit as the divine origin of creative Truth, and allows matter and material law to usurp the prerogatives of omnipotence. He absolutely drops from his summit, coming down to a belief in the material origin of man, for he virtually affirms that the germ of humanity is in a circumscribed and nonintelligent egg.
Deep-reaching interrogations
If this be so, whence cometh Life, or Mind, to the human race? Matter surely does not possess Mind. God is the Life, or intelligence, which forms and preserves the individuality and identity of animals as well as of men. God cannot become finite, and be limited within material bounds. Spirit cannot become matter, nor can Spirit be developed through its opposite. Of what avail is it to investigate what is miscalled material life, which ends, even as it begins, in nameless nothingness? The true sense of being and its eternal perfection should appear now, even as it will hereafter.
Stages of existence
Error of thought is reflected in error of action. The continual contemplation of existence as material and corporeal–as beginning and ending, and with birth, decay, and dissolution as its component stages–hides the true and spiritual Life, and causes our standard to trail in the dust. If Life has any startingpoint whatsoever, then the great I AM is a myth. If Life is God, as the Scriptures imply, then Life is not embryonic, it is infinite. An egg is an impossible enclosure for Deity.
Embryology supplies no instance of one species producing its opposite. A serpent never begets a bird, nor does a lion bring forth a lamb. Amalgamation is deemed monstrous and is seldom fruitful, but it is not so hideous and absurd as the supposition that Spirit–the pure and holy, the immutable and immortal–can originate the impure and mortal and dwell in it. As Christian Science repudiates self-evident impossibilities, the material senses must father these absurdities, for both the material senses and their reports are unnatural, impossible, and unreal.
The real producer
Either Mind produces, or it is produced. If Mind is first, it cannot produce its opposite in quality and quantity, called matter. If matter is first, it cannot produce Mind. Like produces like. In natural history, the bird is not the product of a beast. In spiritual history, matter is not the progenitor of Mind.
The ascent of species
One distinguished naturalist argues that mortals spring from eggs and in races. Mr. Darwin admits this, but he adds that mankind has ascended through all the lower grades of existence. Evolution describes the gradations of human belief, but it does not acknowledge the method of divine Mind, nor see that material methods are impossible in divine Science and that all Science is of God, not of man.
Transmitted peculiarities
Naturalists ask: “What can there be, of a material nature, transmitted through these bodies called eggs, themselves composed of the simplest material elements,–by which all peculiarities of an- cestry, belonging to either sex, are brought down from generation to generation?” The question of the naturalist amounts to this: How can matter originate or transmit mind? We answer that it cannot. Darkness and doubt encompass thought, so long as it bases creation on materiality. From a material standpoint, “Canst thou by searching find out God?” All must be Mind, or else all must be matter. Neither can produce the other. Mind is immortal; but error declares that the material seed must decay in order to propagate its species, and the resulting germ is doomed to the same routine.
Causation not in matter
The ancient and hypothetical question, Which is first, the egg or the bird? is answered, if the egg produces the parent. But we cannot stop here. Another question follows: Who or what produces the parent of the egg? That the earth was hatched from the “egg of night” was once an accepted theory. Heathen philosophy, modern geology, and all other material hypotheses deal with causation as contingent on matter and as necessarily apparent to the corporeal senses, even where the proof requisite to sustain this assumption is undiscovered. Mortal theories make friends of sin, sickness, and death; whereas the spiritual scientific facts of existence include no member of this dolorous and fatal triad.
Emergence of mortals
Human experience in mortal life, which starts from an egg, corresponds with that of Job, when he says, “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.” Mortals must emerge from this notion of material life as all-in-all. They must peck open their shells with Christian Science, and look outward and upward. But thought, loosened from a material basis but not yet instructed by Science, may become wild with freedom and so be self-contradictory.
Persistence of species
From a material source flows no remedy for sorrow, sin, and death, for the redeeming power, from the ills they occasion, is not in egg nor in dust. The blending tints of leaf and flower show the order of matter to be the order of mortal mind. The intermixture of different species, urged to its utmost limits, results in a return to the original species. Thus it is learned that matter is a manifestation of mortal mind, and that matter always surrenders its claims when the perfect and eternal Mind is understood.
Better basis than embryology
Naturalists describe the origin of mortal and material existence in the various forms of embryology, and accompany their descriptions with important observations, which should awaken thought to a higher and purer contemplation of man’s origin. This clearer consciousness must precede an understanding of the harmony of being. Mortal thought must obtain a better basis, get nearer the truth of being, or health will never be universal, and harmony will never become the standard of man. One of our ablest naturalists has said: “We have no right to assume that individuals have grown or been formed under circumstances which made material conditions essential to their maintenance and reproduction, or important to their origin and first introduction.” Why, then, is the naturalist’s basis so materialistic, and why are his deductions generally material?
All nativity in thought
Adam was created before Eve. In this instance, it is seen that the maternal egg never brought forth Adam. Eve was formed from Adam’s rib, not from a foetal ovum. Whatever theory may be adopted by general mortal thought to account for human origin, that theory is sure to become the signal for the appearance of its method in finite forms and operations. If consentaneous human belief agrees upon an ovum as the point of emergence for the human race, this potent belief will immediately supersede the more ancient superstition about the creation from dust or from the rib of our primeval father.
Being is immortal
You may say that mortals are formed before they think or know aught of their origin, and you may also ask how belief can affect a result which precedes the development of that belief. It can only be replied, that Christian Science reveals what “eye hath not seen,”–even the cause of all that exists,–for the universe, inclusive of man, is as eternal as God, who is its divine immortal Principle. There is no such thing as mortality, nor are there properly any mortal beings, because being is immortal, like Deity,–or, rather, being and Deity are inseparable.
Our conscious development
Error is always error. It is no thing. Any statement of life, following from a misconception of life, is erroneous, because it is destitute of any knowledge of the so-called selfhood of life, destitute of any knowledge of its origin or existence. The mortal is unconscious of his foetal and infantile existence; but as he grows up into another false claim, that of self-conscious matter, he learns to say, “I am somebody; but who made me?” Error replies, “God made you.” The first effort of error has been and is to impute to God the creation of whatever is sinful and mortal; but infinite Mind sets at naught such a mistaken belief.
Mendacity of error
Jesus defined this opposite of God and His creation better than we can, when he said, “He is a liar, and the father of it.” Jesus also said, “Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?” This he said of Judas, one of Adam’s race. Jesus never intimated that God made a devil, but he did say, “Ye are of your father, the devil.” All these sayings were to show that mind in matter is the author of itself, and is simply a falsity and illusion.
Ailments of animals
It is the general belief that the lower animals are less sickly than those possessing higher organizations, especially those of the human form. This would indicate that there is less disease in proportion as the force of mortal mind is less pungent or sensitive, and that health attends the absence of mortal mind. A fair conclusion from this might be, that it is the human belief, and not the divine arbitrament, which brings the physical organism under the yoke of disease.
Ignorance the sign of error
An inquirer once said to the discoverer of Christian Science: “I like your explanations of truth, but I do not comprehend what you say about error.” This is the nature of error. The mark of ignorance is on its forehead, for it neither understands nor can be understood. Error would have itself received as mind, as if it were as real and God-created as truth; but Christian Science attributes to error neither entity nor power, because error is neither mind nor the outcome of Mind.
The origin of divinity
Searching for the origin of man, who is the reflection of God, is like inquiring into the origin of God, the selfexistent and eternal. Only impotent error would seek to unite Spirit with matter, good with evil, immortality with mortality, and call this sham unity man, as if man were the offspring of both Mind and matter, of both Deity and humanity. Creation rests on a spiritual basis. We lose our standard of perfection and set aside the proper conception of Deity, when we admit that the perfect is the author of aught that can become imperfect, that God bestows the power to sin, or that Truth confers the ability to err. Our great example, Jesus, could restore the individualized manifestation of existence, which seemed to vanish in death. Knowing that God was the Life of man, Jesus was able to present himself unchanged after the crucifixion. Truth fosters the idea of Truth, and not the belief in illusion or error. That which is real, is sustained by Spirit.
Genera classified
Vertebrata, articulata, mollusca, and radiata are mortal and material concepts classified, and are supposed to possess life and mind. These false beliefs will disappear, when the radiation of Spirit destroys forever all belief in intelligent matter. Then will the new heaven and new earth appear, for the former things will have passed away.
The Christian’s privilege
Mortal belief infolds the conditions of sin. Mortal belief dies to live again in renewed forms, only to go out at last forever; for life everlasting is not to be gained by dying. Christian Science may absorb the attention of sage and philosopher, but the Christian alone can fathom it. It is made known most fully to him who understands best the divine Life. Did the origin and the enlightenment of the race come from the deep sleep which fell upon Adam? Sleep is darkness, but God’s creative mandate was, “Let there be light.” In sleep, cause and effect are mere illusions. They seem to be something, but are not. Oblivion and dreams, not realities, come with sleep. Even so goes on the Adam-belief, of which mortal and material life is the dream.
Ontology versus physiology
Ontology receives less attention than physiology. Why? Because mortal mind must waken to spiritual life before it cares to solve the problem of being, hence the author’s experience; but when that awakening comes, existence will be on a new standpoint.
It is related that a father plunged his infant babe, only a few hours old, into the water for several minutes, and repeated this operation daily, until the child could remain under water twenty minutes, moving and playing without harm, like a fish. Parents should remember this and learn how to develop their children properly on dry land.
The curse removed
Mind controls the birth-throes in the lower realms of nature, where parturition is without suffering. Vegetables, minerals, and many animals suffer no pain in multiplying; but human propagation has its suffering because it is a false belief. Christian Science reveals harmony as proportionately increasing as the line of creation rises towards spiritual man,–towards enlarged understanding and intelligence; but in the line of the corporeal senses, the less a mortal knows of sin, disease, and mortality, the better for him,–the less pain and sorrow are his. When the mist of mortal mind evaporates, the curse will be removed which says to woman, “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” Divine Science rolls back the clouds of error with the light of Truth, and lifts the curtain on man as never born and as never dying, but as coexistent with his creator. Popular theology takes up the history of man as if he began materially right, but immediately fell into mental sin; whereas revealed religion proclaims the Science of Mind and its formations as being in accordance with the first chapter of the Old Testament, when God, Mind, spake and it was done.
Chapter XVI – The Apocalypse
Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.–REVELATION.
Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in the mountain of His holiness.–PSALMS.
- JOHN writes, in the tenth chapter of his book of Revelation :
And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: and he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth.
The new Evangel
This angel or message which comes from God, clothed with a cloud, prefigures divine Science. To mortal sense Science seems at first obscure, abstract, and dark; but a bright promise crowns its brow. When understood, it is Truth’s prism and praise. When you look it fairly in the face, you can heal by its means, and it has for you a light above the sun, for God “is the light thereof.” Its feet are pillars of fire, foundations of Truth and Love. It brings the baptism of the Holy Ghost, whose flames of Truth were prophetically described by John the Baptist as consuming error.
Truth’s volume
This angel had in his hand “a little book,” open for all to read and understand. Did this same book contain the revelation of divine Science, the “right foot” or dominant power of which was upon the sea,–upon elementary, latent error, the source of all error’s visible forms? The angel’s left foot was upon the earth; that is, a secondary power was exercised upon visible error and audible sin. The “still, small voice” of scientific thought reaches over continent and ocean to the globe’s remotest bound. The inaudible voice of Truth is, to the human mind, “as when a lion roareth.” It is heard in the desert and in dark places of fear. It arouses the “seven thunders” of evil, and stirs their latent forces to utter the full diapason of secret tones. Then is the power of Truth demonstrated,–made manifest in the destruction of error. Then will a voice from harmony cry: “Go and take the little book. . . . Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.” Mortals, obey the heavenly evangel. Take divine Science. Read this book from beginning to end. Study it, ponder it. It will be indeed sweet at its first taste, when it heals you; but murmur not over Truth, if you find its digestion bitter. When you approach nearer and nearer to this divine Principle, when you eat the divine body of this Principle, – thus partaking of the nature, or primal elements, of Truth and Love, – do not be surprised nor discontented because you must share the hemlock cup and eat the bitter herbs; for the Israelites of old at the Paschal meal thus prefigured this perilous passage out of bondage into the El Dorado of faith and hope.
To-day’s lesson
The twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse, or Revelation of St. John, has a special suggestiveness in connection with the nineteenth century. In the opening of the sixth seal, typical of six thousand years since Adam, the distinctive feature has reference to the present age.
Revelation xii. 1. And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.
True estimate of God’s messenger
Heaven represents harmony, and divine Science interprets the Principle of heavenly harmony. The great miracle, to human sense, is divine Love, and the grand necessity of existence is to gain the true idea of what constitutes the kingdom of heaven in man. This goal is never reached while we hate our neighbor or entertain a false estimate of anyone whom God has appointed to voice His Word. Again, without a correct sense of its highest visible idea, we can never understand the divine Principle. The botanist must know the genus and species of a plant in order to classify it correctly. As it is with things, so is it with persons.
Persecution harmful
Abuse of the motives and religion of St. Paul hid from view the apostle’s character, which made him equal to his great mission. Persecution of all who have spoken something new and better of God has not only obscured the light of the ages, but has been fatal to the persecutors. Why? Because it has hid from them the true idea which has been presented. To misunderstand Paul, was to be ignorant of the divine idea he taught. Ignorance of the divine idea betrays at once a greater ignorance of the divine Principle of the idea – ignorance of Truth and Love. The understanding of Truth and Love, the Principle which works out the ends of eternal good and destroys both faith in evil and the practice of evil, leads to the discernment of the divine idea.
Espousals supernal
Agassiz, through his microscope, saw the sun in an egg at a point of so-called embryonic life. Because of his more spiritual vision, St. John saw an “angel standing in the sun.” The Revelator beheld the spiritual idea from the mount of vision. Purity was the symbol of Life and Love. The Revelator saw also the spiritual ideal as a woman clothed in light, a bride coming down from heaven, wedded to the Lamb of Love. To John, “the bride” and “the Lamb” represented the correlation of divine Principle and spiritual idea, God and His Christ, bringing harmony to earth.
Divinity and humanity
John saw the human and divine coincidence, shown in the man Jesus, as divinity embracing humanity in Life and its demonstration,–reducing to human perception and understanding the Life which is God. In divine revelation, material and corporeal selfhood disappear, and the spiritual idea is understood.
Spiritual sunlight
The woman in the Apocalypse symbolizes generic man, the spiritual idea of God; she illustrates the coincidence of God and man as the divine Principle and divine idea. The Revelator symbolizes Spirit by the sun. The spiritual idea is clad with the radiance of spiritual Truth, and matter is put under her feet. The light portrayed is really neither solar nor lunar, but spiritual Life, which is “the light of men.” In the first chapter of the Fourth Gospel it is written, “There was a man sent from God . . . to bear witness of that Light.”
Spiritual idea revealed
John the Baptist prophesied the coming of the immaculate Jesus, and John saw in those days the spiritual idea as the Messiah, who would baptize with the Holy Ghost,–divine Science. As Elias presented the idea of the fatherhood of God, which Jesus afterwards manifested, so the Revelator completed this figure with woman, typifying the spiritual idea of God’s motherhood. The moon is under her feet. This idea reveals the universe as secondary and tributary to Spirit, from which the universe borrows its reflected light, substance, life, and intelligence.
Spiritual idea crowned
The spiritual idea is crowned with twelve stars. The twelve tribes of Israel with all mortals,–separated by belief from man’s divine origin and the true idea,–will through much tribulation yield to the activities of the divine Principle of man in the harmony of Science. These are the stars in the crown of rejoicing. They are the lamps in the spiritual heavens of the age, which show the workings of the spiritual idea by healing the sick and the sinning, and by manifesting the light which shines “unto the perfect day” as the night of materialism wanes.
Revelation xii. 2. And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
Travail and joy
Also the spiritual idea is typified by a woman in travail, waiting to be delivered of her sweet promise, but remembering no more her sorrow for joy that the birth goes on; for great is the idea, and the travail portentous.
Revelation xii. 3. And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.
The dragon as a type
Human sense may well marvel at discord, while, to a diviner sense., harmony is the real and discord the unreal. We may well be astonished at sin, sickness, and death. We may well be perplexed at human fear; and still more astounded at hatred, which lifts its hydra head, showing its horns in the many inventions of evil. But why should we stand aghast at nothingness? The great red dragon symbolizes a lie,–the belief that substance, life, and intelligence can be material. This dragon stands for the sum total of human error. The ten horns of the dragon typify the belief that matter has power of its own, and that by means of an evil mind in matter the Ten Commandments can be broken.
The sting of the serpent
The Revelator lifts the veil from this embodiment of all evil, and beholds its awful character; but he also sees the nothingness of evil and the allness of God. The Revelator sees that old serpent, whose name is devil or evil, holding untiring watch, that he may bite the heel of truth and seemingly impede the offspring of the spiritual idea, which is prolific in health, holiness, and immortality.
Revelation xii. 4. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
Animal tendency
The serpentine form stands for subtlety, winding its way amidst all evil, but doing this in the name of good. Its sting is spoken of by Paul, when he refers to “spiritual wickedness in high places.” It is the animal instinct in mortals, which would impel them to devour each other and cast out devils through Beelzebub.
As of old, evil still charges the spiritual idea with error’s own nature and methods. This malicious animal instinct, of which the dragon is the type, incites mortals to kill morally and physically even their fellow-mortals, and worse still, to charge the innocent with the crime. This last infirmity of sin will sink its perpetrator into a night without a star.
Malicious barbarity
The author is convinced that the accusations against Jesus of Nazareth and even his crucifixion were instigated by the criminal instinct here described. The Revelator speaks of Jesus as the Lamb of God and of the dragon as warring against innocence. Since Jesus must have been tempted in all points, he, the immaculate, met and conquered sin in every form. The brutal barbarity of his foes could emanate from no source except the highest degree of human depravity. Jesus “opened not his mouth.” Until the majesty of Truth should be demonstrated in divine Science, the spiritual idea was arraigned before the tribunal of so-called mortal mind, which was unloosed in order that the false claim of mind in matter might uncover its own crime of defying immortal Mind.
Doom of the dragon
From Genesis to the Apocalypse, sin, sickness, and death, envy, hatred, and revenge, – all evil, – are typified by a serpent, or animal subtlety. Jesus said, quoting a line from the Psalms, “They hated me without a cause.” The serpent is perpetually close upon the heel of harmony. From the beginning to the end, the serpent pursues with hatred the spiritual idea. In Genesis, this allegorical, talking serpent typifies mortal mind, “more subtle than any beast of the field.” In the Apocalypse, when nearing its doom, this evil increases and becomes the great red dragon, swollen with sin, inflamed with war against spirituality, and ripe for destruction. It is full of lust and hate, loathing the brightness of divine glory.
Revelation xii. 5. And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to His throne.
The conflict with purity
Led on by the grossest element of mortal mind, Herod decreed the death of every male child in order that the man Jesus, the masculine representative of the spiritual idea might never hold sway and deprive Herod of his crown. The impersonation of the spiritual idea had a brief history in the earthly life of our Master; but “of his kingdom there shall be no end,” for Christ, God’s idea, will eventually rule all nations and peoples – imperatively, absolutely, finally – with divine Science. This immaculate idea, represented first by man and, according to the Revelator, last by woman, will baptize with fire; and the fiery baptism will burn up the chaff of error with the fervent heat of Truth and Love, melting and purifying even the gold of human character. After the stars sang together and all was primeval harmony, the material lie made war upon the spiritual idea; but this only impelled the idea to rise to the zenith of demonstration, destroying sin, sickness, and death, and to be caught up unto God,–to be found in its divine Principle.
Revelation xii. 6. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God.
Spiritual guidance
As the children of Israel were guided triumphantly through the Red Sea, the dark ebbing and flowing tides of human fear,–as they were led through the wilderness, walking wearily through the great desert of human hopes, and anticipating the promised joy,–so shall the spiritual idea guide all right desires in their passage from sense to Soul, from a material sense of existence to the spiritual, up to the glory prepared for them who love God. Stately Science pauses not, but moves before them, a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, leading to divine heights.
If we remember the beautiful description which Sir Walter Scott puts into the mouth of Rebecca the Jewess in the story of Ivanhoe,
When Israel, of the Lord beloved,
Out of the land of bondage came,
Her fathers’ God before her moved,
An awful guide, in smoke and flame, –
we may also offer the prayer which concludes the same hymn,
And oh, when stoops on Judah’s path
In shade and storm the frequent night,
Be Thou, longsuffering, slow to wrath,
A burning and a shining light!
Revelation xii. 7, 8. And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought, and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.
Angelic offices
The Old Testament assigns to the angels, God’s divine messages, different offices. Michael’s characteristic is spiritual strength. He leads the hosts of heaven against the power of sin, Satan, and fights the holy wars. Gabriel has the more quiet task of imparting a sense of the ever-presence of ministering Love. These angels deliver us from the depths. Truth and Love come nearer in the hour of woe, when strong faith or spiritual strength wrestles and prevails through the understanding of God. The Gabriel of His presence has no contests. To infinite, ever-present Love, all is Love, and there is no error, no sin, sickness, nor death. Against Love, the dragon warreth not long, for he is killed by the divine Principle. Truth and Love prevail against the dragon because the dragon cannot war with them. Thus endeth the conflict between the flesh and Spirit.
Revelation xii. 9. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Dragon cast down to earth
That false claim–that ancient belief, that old serpent whose name is devil (evil), claiming that there is intelligence in matter either to benefit or to injure men–is pure delusion, the red dragon; and it is cast out by Christ, Truth, the spiritual idea, and so proved to be powerless. The words “cast unto the earth” show the dragon to be nothingness, dust to dust; and therefore, in his pretence of being a talker, he must be a lie from the beginning. His angels, or messages, are cast out with their author. The beast and the false prophets are lust and hypocrisy. These wolves in sheep’s clothing are detected and killed by innocence, the Lamb of Love.
Warfare with error
Divine Science shows how the Lamb slays the wolf.
Innocence and Truth overcome guilt and error. Ever since the foundation of the world, ever since error would establish material belief, evil has tried to slay the Lamb; but Science is able to destroy this lie, called evil. The twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse typifies the divine method of warfare in Science, and the glorious results of this warfare. The following chapters depict the fatal effects of trying to meet error with error. The narrative follows the order used in Genesis. In Genesis, first the true method of creation is set forth and then the false. Here, also, the Revelator first exhibits the true warfare and then the false.
Revelation xii. 10–12. And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death. Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.
Paean of jubilee
For victory over a single sin, we give thanks and magnify the Lord of Hosts. What shall we say of the mighty conquest over all sin? A louder song, sweeter than has ever before reached high heaven, now rises clearer and nearer to the great heart of Christ; for the accuser is not there, and Love sends forth her primal and everlasting strain. Self-abnegation, by which we lay down all for Truth, or Christ, in our warfare against error, is a rule in Christian Science. This rule clearly interprets God as divine Principle,–as Life, represented by the Father; as Truth, represented by the Son; as Love, represented by the Mother. Every mortal at some period, here or hereafter, must grapple with and overcome the mortal belief in a power opposed to God.
The robe of Science
The Scripture, “Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many,” is literally fulfilled, when we are conscious of the supremacy of Truth, by which the nothingness of error is seen; and we know that the nothingness of error is in proportion to its wickedness. He that touches the hem of Christ’s robe and masters his mortal beliefs, animality, and hate, rejoices in the proof of healing,–in a sweet and certain sense that God is Love. Alas for those who break faith with divine Science and fail to strangle the serpent of sin as well as of sickness! They are dwellers still in the deep darkness of belief. They are in the surging sea of error, not struggling to lift their heads above the drowning wave.
Expiation by suffering
What must the end be? They must eventually expiate their sin through suffering. The sin, which one has made his bosom companion, comes back to him at last with accelerated force, for the devil knoweth his time is short. Here the Scriptures declare that evil is temporal, not eternal. The dragon is at last stung to death by his own malice; but how many periods of torture it may take to remove all sin, must depend upon sin’s obduracy.
Revelation xii. 13. And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child.
Apathy to occultism
The march of mind and of honest investigation will bring the hour when the people will chain, with fetters of some sort, the growing occultism of this period. The present apathy as to the tendency of certain active yet unseen mental agencies will finally be shocked into another extreme mortal mood,–into human indignation; for one extreme follows another.
Revelation xii. 15, 16. And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood, after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood. And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth.
Receptive hearts
Millions of unprejudiced minds–simple seekers for Truth, weary wanderers, athirst in the desert – are waiting and watching for rest and drink. Give them a cup of cold water in Christ’s name, and never fear the consequences. What if the old dragon should send forth a new flood to drown the Christ-idea? He can neither drown your voice with its roar, nor again sink the world into the deep waters of chaos and old night. In this age the earth will help the woman; the spiritual idea will be understood. Those ready for the blessing you impart will give thanks. The waters will be pacified, and Christ will command the wave.
Hidden ways of iniquity
When God heals the sick or the sinning, they should know the great benefit which Mind has wrought. They should also know the great delusion of mortal mind, when it makes them sick or sinful. Many are willing to open the eyes of the people to the power of good resident in divine Mind, but they are not so willing to point out the evil in human thought, and expose evil’s hidden mental ways of accomplishing iniquity.
Christly warning
Why this backwardness, since exposure is necessary to ensure the avoidance of the evil? Because people like you better when you tell them their virtues than when you tell them their vices. It requires the spirit of our blessed Master to tell a man his faults, and so risk human displeasure for the sake of doing right and benefiting our race. Who is telling mankind of the foe in ambush? Is the informer one who sees the foe? If so, listen and be wise. Escape from evil, and designate those as unfaithful stewards who have seen the danger and yet have given no warning.
The armor of divinity
At all times and under all circumstances, overcome evil with good. Know thyself, and God will supply the wisdom and the occasion for a victory over evil. Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you. The cement of a higher humanity will unite all interests in the one divinity.
Pure religion enthroned
Through trope and metaphor, the Revelator, immortal scribe of Spirit and of a true idealism, furnishes the mirror in which mortals may see their own image. In significant figures he depicts the thoughts which he beholds in mortal mind. Thus he rebukes the conceit of sin, and foreshadows its doom. With his spiritual strength, he has opened wide the gates of glory, and illumined the night of paganism with the sublime grandeur of divine Science, outshining sin, sorcery, lust, and hypocrisy. He takes away mitre and sceptre. He enthrones pure and undefiled religion, and lifts on high only those who have washed their robes white in obedience and suffering.
Native nothingness of sin
Thus we see, in both the first and last books of the Bible,–in Genesis and in the Apocalypse,–that sin is to be Christianly and scientifically reduced to its native nothingness. “Love one another” (I John, iii. 23), is the most simple and profound counsel of the inspired writer. In Science we are children of God; but whatever is of material sense, or mortal, belongs not to His children, for materiality is the inverted image of spirituality.
Fulfilment of the Law
Love fulfils the law of Christian Science, and nothing short of this divine Principle, understood and demonstrated, can ever furnish the vision of the Apocalypse, open the seven seals of error with Truth, or uncover the myriad illusions of sin, sickness, and death. Under the supremacy of Spirit, it will be seen and acknowledged that matter must disappear.
In Revelation xxi. 1 we read:
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
Man’s present possibilities
The Revelator had not yet passed the transitional stage in human experience called death, but he already saw a new heaven and a new earth. Through what sense came this vision to St. John? Not through the material visual organs for seeing, for optics are inadequate to take in so wonderful a scene. Were this new heaven and new earth terrestrial or celestial, material or spiritual? They could not be the former, for the human sense of space is unable to grasp such a view. The Revelator was on our plane of existence, while yet beholding what the eye cannot see, – that which is invisible to the uninspired thought. This testimony of Holy Writ sustains the fact in Science, that the heavens and earth to one human consciousness, that consciousness which God bestows, are spiritual, while to another, the unillumined human mind, the vision is material. This shows unmistakably that what the human mind terms matter and spirit indicates states and stages of consciousness.
Nearness of Deity
Accompanying this scientific consciousness was another revelation, even the declaration from heaven, supreme harmony, that God, the divine Principle of harmony, is ever with men, and they are His people. Thus man was no longer regarded as a miserable sinner, but as the blessed child of God. Why? Because St. John’s corporeal sense of the heavens and earth had vanished, and in place of this false sense was the spiritual sense, the subjective state by which he could see the new heaven and new earth, which involve the spiritual idea and consciousness of reality. This is Scriptural authority for concluding that such a recognition of being is, and has been, possible to men in this present state of existence,–that we can become conscious, here and now, of a cessation of death, sorrow, and pain. This is indeed a foretaste of absolute Christian Science. Take heart, dear sufferer, for this reality of being will surely appear sometime and in some way. There will be no more pain, and all tears will be wiped away. When you read this, remember Jesus’ words, “The kingdom of
God is within you.” This spiritual consciousness is therefore a present possibility.
The Revelator also takes in another view, adapted to console the weary pilgrim, journeying ” uphill all the way.”
He writes, in Revelation xxi. 9:
And there came unto me one of the seven angels which had the seven vials full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me, saying, Come hither, I will show thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife.
Vials of wrath and consolation
This ministry of Truth, this message from divine Love, carried John away in spirit. It exalted him till he became conscious of the spiritual facts of being and the “New Jerusalem, coming down from God, out of heaven,” – the spiritual outpouring of bliss and glory, which he describes as the city which “lieth foursquare.” The beauty of this text is, that the sum total of human misery, represented by the seven angelic vials full of seven plagues, has full compensation in the law of Love. Note this,–that the very message, or swift-winged thought, which poured forth hatred and torment, brought also the experience which at last lifted the seer to behold the great city, the four equal sides of which were heaven-bestowed and heaven-bestowing.
Spiritual wedlock
Think of this, dear reader, for it will lift the sackcloth from your eyes, and you will behold the softwinged dove descending upon you. The very circumstance, which your suffering sense deems wrathful and afflictive, Love can make an angel entertained unawares. Then thought gently whispers:
“Come hither! Arise from your false consciousness into the true sense of Love, and behold the Lamb’s wife,–Love wedded to its own spiritual idea.” Then cometh the marriage feast, for this revelation will destroy forever the physical plagues imposed by material sense.
The city foursquare
This sacred city, described in the Apocalypse (xxi. 16) as one that “lieth foursquare” and cometh “down from God, out of heaven,” represents the light and glory of divine Science. The builder and maker of this New Jerusalem is God, as we read in the book of Hebrews; and it is “a city which hath foundations.” The description is metaphoric. Spiritual teaching must always be by symbols. Did not Jesus illustrate the truths he taught by the mustard-seed and the prodigal? Taken in its allegorical sense, the description of the city as foursquare has a profound meaning. The four sides of our city are the Word, Christ, Christianity, and divine Science; “and the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there.” This city is wholly spiritual, as its four sides indicate.
The royally divine gates
As the Psalmist saith, “Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King.” It is indeed a city of the Spirit, fair, royal, and square. Northward, its gates open to the North Star, the Word, the polar magnet of Revelation; eastward, to the star seen by the Wisemen of the Orient, who followed it to the manger of Jesus; southward, to the genial tropics, with the Southern Cross in the skies, – the Cross of Calvary, which binds human society into solemn union; westward, to the grand realization of the Golden Shore of Love and the Peaceful Sea of Harmony.
Revelation’s pure zenith
This heavenly city, lighted by the Sun of Righteousness,–this New Jerusalem, this infinite All, which to us seems hidden in the mist of remoteness, reached St. John’s vision while yet he tabernacled with mortals.
In Revelation xxi. 22, further describing this holy city, the beloved Disciple writes:
And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.
The shrine celestial
There was no temple,–that is, no material structure in which to worship God, for He must be worshipped in spirit and in love. The word temple also means body. The Revelator was familiar with Jesus’ use of this word, as when Jesus spoke of his material body as the temple to be temporarily rebuilt (John ii. 21). What further indication need we of the real man’s incorporeality than this, that John saw heaven and earth with “no temple [body] therein”? This kingdom of God “is within you,”–is within reach of man’s consciousness here, and the spiritual idea reveals it. In divine Science, man possesses this recognition of harmony consciously in proportion to his understanding of God.
Divine sense of Deity
The term Lord, as used in our version of the Old Testament, is often synonymous with Jehovah, and expresses the Jewish concept, not yet elevated to deific apprehension through spiritual transfiguration. Yet the word gradually approaches a higher meaning. This human sense of Deity yields to the divine sense, even as the material sense of personality yields to the incorporeal sense of God and man as the infinite Principle and infinite idea, – as one Father with His universal family, held in the gospel of Love. The Lamb’s wife presents the unity of male and female as no longer two wedded individuals, but as two individual natures in one; and this compounded spiritual individuality reflects God as Father-Mother, not as a corporeal being. In this divinely united spiritual consciousness, there is no impediment to eternal bliss,–to the perfectibility of God’s creation.
The city of our God
This spiritual, holy habitation has no boundary nor limit, but its four cardinal points are: first, the Word of Life, Truth, and Love; second, the Christ, the spiritual idea of God; third, Christianity, which is the outcome of the divine Principle of the Christ-idea in Christian history; fourth, Christian Science, which to-day and forever interprets this great example and the great Exemplar. This city of our God has no need of sun or satellite, for Love is the light of it, and divine Mind is its own interpreter. All who are saved must walk in this light. Mighty potentates and dynasties will lay down their honors within the heavenly city. Its gates open towards light and glory both within and without, for all is good, and nothing can enter that city, which “defileth. . . . or maketh a lie.” The writer’s present feeble sense of Christian Science closes with St. John’s Revelation as recorded by the great apostle, for his vision is the acme of this Science as the Bible reveals it.
In the following Psalm one word shows, though faintly, the light which Christian Science throws on the Scriptures by substituting for the corporeal sense, the incorporeal or spiritual sense of Deity:
PSALM XXIII
[DIVINE LOVE] is my shepherd; I shall not want.
[LOVE] maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
[LOVE] leadeth me beside the still waters.
[LOVE] restoreth my soul [spiritual sense]: [Love] leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for [LOVE] is with me; [LOVE’s] rod and [LOVE’S] staff they comfort me.
[LOVE] prepareth a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: [LOVE] anointeth my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house [the consciousness] of [LOVE] forever.
Chapter XVII – Glossary
These things saith He that is holy, He that is true, He that hath the key of David, He that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth; I know thy works : behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.–REVELATION.
In Christian Science we learn that the substitution of the spiritual for the material definition of a Scriptural word often elucidates the meaning of the inspired writer. On this account this chapter is added. It contains the metaphysical interpretation of Bible terms, giving their spiritual sense, which is also their original meaning.
ABEL. Watchfulness; self-offering; surrendering to the creator the early fruits of experience.
ABRAHAM. Fidelity; faith in the divine Life and in the eternal Principle of being.
This patriarch illustrated the purpose of Love to create trust in good, and showed the life-preserving power of spiritual understanding.
ADAM. Error; a falsity; the belief in “original sin,” sickness, and death; evil; the opposite of good,–of God and His creation; a curse; a belief in intelligent matter, finiteness, and mortality; “dust to dust;” red sandstone; nothingness; the first god of mythology; not God’s man, who represents the one God and is His own image and likeness; the opposite of Spirit and His creations; that which is not the image and likeness of good, but a material belief, opposed to the one Mind, or Spirit; a so-called finite mind, producing other minds, thus making “gods many and lords many” (I Corinthians viii. 5); a product of nothing as the mimicry of something; an unreality as opposed to the great reality of spiritual existence and creation; a so-called man, whose origin, substance, and mind are found to be the antipode of God, or Spirit; an inverted image of Spirit; the image and likeness of what God has not created, namely, matter, sin, sickness, and death; the opposer of Truth, termed error; Life’s counterfeit, which ultimates in death; the opposite of Love, called hate; the usurper of Spirit’s creation, called self-creative matter; immortality’s opposite, mortality; that of which wisdom saith, “Thou shalt surely die.”
The name Adam represents the false supposition that Life is not eternal, but has beginning and end; that the infinite enters the finite, that intelligence passes into nonintelligence, and that Soul dwells in material sense; that immortal Mind results in matter, and matter in mortal mind; that the one God and creator entered what He created, and then disappeared in the atheism of matter.
ADVERSARY. An adversary is one who opposes, denies, disputes, not one who constructs and sustains reality and Truth. Jesus said of the devil, “He was a murderer from the beginning, . . . he is a liar and the father of it.”
This view of Satan is confirmed by the name often conferred upon him in Scripture, the “adversary.”
ALMIGHTY. All-power; infinity; omnipotence.
ANGELS. God’s thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect; the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality, counteracting all evil, sensuality, and mortality.
ARK. Safety; the idea, or reflection, of Truth, proved to be as immortal as its Principle; the understanding of Spirit, destroying belief in matter.
God and man coexistent and eternal; Science showing that the spiritual realities of all things are created by Him and exist forever. The ark indicates temptation overcome and followed by exaltation.
ASHER (Jacob’s son). Hope and faith; spiritual compensation; the ills of the flesh rebuked.
BABEL. Self-destroying error; a kingdom divided against itself, which cannot stand; material knowledge.
The higher false knowledge builds on the basis of evidence obtained from the five corporeal senses, the more confusion ensues, and the more certain is the downfall of its structure.
BAPTISM. Purification by Spirit; submergence in Spirit.
We are “willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.” (II Corinthians v. 8.)
BELIEVING. Firmness and constancy; not a faltering nor a blind faith, but the perception of spiritual Truth. Mortal thoughts, illusion.
BENJAMIN (Jacob’s son). A physical belief as to life, substance, and mind; human knowledge, or so-called mortal mind, devoted to matter; pride; envy; fame; illusion; a false belief; error masquerading as the possessor of life, strength, animation, and power to act.
Renewal of affections; self-offering; an improved state of mortal mind; the introduction of a more spiritual origin; a gleam of the infinite idea of the infinite Principle; a spiritual type; that which comforts, consoles, and supports.
BRIDE. Purity and innocence, conceiving man in the idea of God; a sense of Soul, which has spiritual bliss and enjoys but cannot suffer.
BRIDEGROOM. Spiritual understanding; the pure consciousness that God, the divine Principle, creates man as His own spiritual idea, and that God is the only creative power.
BURIAL. Corporeality and physical sense put out of sight and hearing; annihilation. Submergence in Spirit; immortality brought to light.
CANAAN (the son of Ham). A sensuous belief; the testimony of what is termed material sense; the error which would make man mortal and would make mortal mind a slave to the body.
CHILDREN. The spiritual thoughts and representatives of Life, Truth, and Love. Sensual and mortal beliefs; counterfeits of creation, whose better originals are God’s thoughts, not in embryo, but in maturity; material suppositions of life, substance, and intelligence, opposed to the Science of being.
CHILDREN OF ISRAEL. The representatives of Soul, not corporeal sense; the offspring of Spirit, who, having wrestled with error, sin, and sense, are governed by divine Science; some of the ideas of God beheld as men, casting out error and healing the sick; Christ’s offspring.
CHRIST. The divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error.
CHURCH. The structure of Truth and Love; whatever rests upon and proceeds from divine Principle.
The Church is that institution, which affords proof of its utility and is found elevating the race, rousing the dormant understanding from material beliefs to the apprehension of spiritual ideas and the demonstration of divine Science, thereby casting out devils, or error, and healing the sick.
CREATOR. Spirit; Mind; intelligence; the animating divine Principle of all that is real and good; self-existent Life, Truth, and Love; that which is perfect and eternal; the opposite of matter and evil, which have no Principle; God, who made all that was made and could not create an atom or an element the opposite of Himself.
DAN (Jacob’s son). Animal magnetism; so-called mortal mind controlling mortal mind; error, working out the designs of error; one belief preying upon another.
DAY. The irradiance of Life; light, the spiritual idea of Truth and Love.
“And the evening and the morning were the first day.” (Genesis i. 5.) The objects of time and sense disappear in the illumination of spiritual understanding, and Mind measures time according to the good that is unfolded. This unfolding is God’s day, and “there shall be no night there.”
DEATH. An illusion, the lie of life in matter; the unreal and untrue; the opposite of Life.
Matter has no life, hence it has no real existence. Mind is immortal. The flesh, warring against Spirit; that which frets itself free from one belief only to be fettered by another, until every belief of life where Life is not yields to eternal Life. Any material evidence of death is false, for it contradicts the spiritual facts of being.
DEVIL. Evil; a lie; error; neither corporeality nor mind; the opposite of Truth; a belief in sin, sickness, and death; animal magnetism or hypnotism; the lust of the flesh, which saith: ” I am life and intelligence in matter. There is more than one mind, for I am mind, a wicked mind, self-made or created by a tribal god and put into the opposite of mind, termed matter, thence to reproduce a mortal universe, including man, not after the image and likeness of Spirit, but after its own image.”
DOVE. A symbol of divine Science; purity and peace; hope and faith.
DUST. Nothingness; the absence of substance, life, or intelligence.
EARS. Not organs of the so-called corporeal senses, but spiritual understanding.
Jesus said, referring to spiritual perception, “Having ears, hear ye not?” (Mark viii. 18.)
EARTH. A sphere; a type of eternity and immortality, which are likewise without beginning or end.
To material sense, earth is matter; to spiritual sense, it is a compound idea.
ELIAS. Prophecy; spiritual evidence opposed to material sense; Christian Science, with which can be discerned the spiritual fact of whatever the material senses behold; the basis of immortality.
“Elias truly shall first come and restore all things.” (Matthew xvii. 11.)
ERROR. See chapter on Recapitulation, page 472.
EUPHRATES (river). Divine Science encompassing the universe and man; the true idea of God; a type of the glory which is to come; metaphysics taking the place of physics; the reign of righteousness. The atmosphere of human belief before it accepts sin, sickness, or death; a state of mortal thought, the only error of which is limitation; finity; the opposite of infinity.
EVE. A beginning; mortality; that which does not last forever; a finite belief concerning life, substance, and intelligence in matter; error; the belief that the human race originated materially instead of spiritually, that man started first from dust, second from a rib, and third from an egg.
EVENING. Mistiness of mortal thought; weariness of mortal mind; obscured views; peace and rest.
EYES. Spiritual discernment,–not material but mental.
Jesus said, thinking of the outward vision, “Having eyes, see ye not?” (Mark viii. 18.)
FAN. Separator of fable from fact; that which gives action to thought.
FATHER. Eternal Life; the one Mind; the divine Principle, commonly called God.
FEAR. Heat; inflammation; anxiety; ignorance; error; desire; caution.
FIRE. Fear; remorse; lust; hatred; destruction; affliction purifying and elevating man.
FIRMAMENT. Spiritual understanding; the scientific line of demarcation between Truth and error, between Spirit and so-called matter.
FLESH. An error of physical belief; a supposition that life, substance, and intelligence are in matter; an illusion; a belief that matter has sensation.
GAD (Jacob’s son). Science; spiritual being understood; haste towards harmony.
GETHSEMANE. Patient woe; the human yielding to the divine; love meeting no response, but still remaining love.
GHOST. An illusion; a belief that mind is outlined and limited; a supposition that spirit is finite.
GIHON (river). The rights of woman acknowledged morally, civilly, and socially.
GOD. The great I AM; the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence.
GODS. Mythology; a belief that life, substance, and intelligence are both mental and material; a supposition of sentient physicality; the belief that infinite Mind is in finite forms; the various theories that hold mind to be a material sense, existing in brain, nerve, matter; supposititious minds, or souls, going in and out of matter, erring and mortal; the serpents of error, which say, “Ye shall be as gods.”
God is one God, infinite and perfect, and cannot become finite and imperfect.
GOOD. God; Spirit; omnipotence; omniscience; omnipresence; omni-action.
HAM (Noah’s son). Corporeal belief; sensuality; slavery; tyranny.
HEART. Mortal feelings, motives, affections, joys, and sorrows.
HEAVEN. Harmony; the reign of Spirit; government by divine Principle; spirituality; bliss; the atmosphere of Soul.
HELL. Mortal belief; error; lust; remorse; hatred; revenge; sin; sickness; death; suffering and self-destruction, self-imposed agony; effects of sin; that which “worketh abomination or maketh a lie.”
HIDDEKEL (river). Divine Science understood and acknowledged.
HOLY GHOST. Divine Science; the development of eternal Life, Truth, and Love.
I, or EGO. Divine Principle; Spirit; Soul; incorporeal, unerring, immortal, and eternal Mind.
There is but one I, or Us, but one divine Principle, or Mind, governing all existence; man and woman unchanged forever in their individual characters, even as numbers which never blend with each other, though they are governed by one Principle. All the objects of God’s creation reflect one Mind, and whatever reflects not this one Mind, is false and erroneous, even the belief that life, substance, and intelligence are both mental and material.
I AM. God; incorporeal and eternal Mind; divine Principle; the only Ego.
- A term obsolete in Science if used with reference to Spirit, or Deity.
INTELLIGENCE. Substance; self-existent and eternal Mind; that which is never unconscious nor limited.
See chapter on Recapitulation,
ISSACHAR (Jacob’s son). A corporeal belief; the offspring of error; envy; hatred; selfishness; self-will; lust.
JACOB. A corporeal mortal embracing duplicity, repentance, sensualism. Inspiration; the revelation of Science, in which the so-called material senses yield to the spiritual sense of Life and Love.
JAPHET (Noah’s son). A type of spiritual peace, flowing from the understanding that God is the divine Principle of all existence, and that man is His idea, the child of His care.
JERUSALEM. Mortal belief and knowledge obtained from the five corporeal senses; the pride of power and the power of pride; sensuality; envy; oppression; tyranny. Home, heaven.
JESUS. The highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea, rebuking and destroying error and bringing to light man’s immortality.
JOSEPH. A corporeal mortal; a higher sense of Truth rebuking mortal belief, or error, and showing the immortality and supremacy of Truth; pure affection blessing its enemies.
JUDAH. A corporeal material belief progressing and disappearing; the spiritual understanding of God and man appearing.
KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. The rein of harmony in divine Science; the realm of unerring, eternal, and omnipotent Mind; the atmosphere of Spirit, where Soul is supreme.
KNOWLEDGE. Evidence obtained from the five corporeal senses; mortality; beliefs and opinions; human theories, doctrines, hypotheses; that which is not divine and is the origin of sin, sickness, and death; the opposite of spiritual Truth and understanding.
LAMB OF GOD. The spiritual idea of Love; self-immolation; innocence and purity; sacrifice.
LEVI (Jacob’s son). A corporeal and sensual belief; mortal man; denial of the fulness of God’s creation; ecclesiastical despotism.
LIFE. See chapter on Recapitulation, page 468.
LORD. In the Hebrew, this term is sometimes employed as a title, which has the inferior sense of master, or ruler. In the Greek, the word kurios almost always has this lower sense, unless specially coupled with the name God. Its higher signification is Supreme Ruler.
LORD GOD. Jehovah.
This double term is not used in the first chapter of Genesis, the record of spiritual creation. It is introduced in the second and following chapters, when the spiritual sense of God and of infinity is disappearing from the recorder’s thought,–when the true scientific statements of the Scriptures become clouded through a physical sense of God as finite and corporeal. From this follow idolatry and mythology,–belief in many gods, or material intelligences, as the opposite of the one Spirit, or intelligence, named Elohim, or God.
MAN. The compound idea of infinite Spirit; the spiritual image and likeness of God; the full representation of Mind.
MATTER. Mythology; mortality; another name for mortal mind; illusion; intelligence, substance, and life in non-intelligence and mortality; life resulting in death, and death in life; sensation in the sensationless; mind originating in matter; the opposite of Truth; the opposite of Spirit; the opposite of God; that of which immortal Mind takes no cognizance; that which mortal mind sees, feels, hears, tastes, and smells only in belief.
MIND. The only I, or Us; the only Spirit, Soul, divine Principle, substance, Life, Truth, Love; the one God; not that which is in man, but the divine Principle, or God, of whom man is the full and perfect expression; Deity, which outlines but is not outlined.
MIRACLE. That which is divinely natural, but must be learned humanly; a phenomenon of Science.
MORNING. Light; symbol of Truth; revelation and progress.
MORTAL MIND. Nothing claiming to be something, for Mind is immortal; mythology; error creating other errors; a suppositional material sense, alias the belief that sensation is in matter, which is sensationless; a belief that life, substance, and intelligence are in and of matter; the opposite of Spirit, and therefore the opposite of God, or good; the belief that life has a beginning and therefore an end; the belief that man is the offspring of mortals; the belief that there can be more than one creator; idolatry; the subjective states of error; material senses; that which neither exists in Science nor can be recognized by the spiritual sense; sin; sickness; death.
MOSES. A corporeal mortal; moral courage; a type of moral law and the demonstration thereof; the proof that, without the gospel, – the union of justice and affection,–there is something spiritually lacking, since justice demands penalties under the law.
MOTHER. God; divine and eternal Principle; Life, Truth, and Love.
NEW JERUSALEM. Divine Science; the spiritual facts and harmony of the universe; the kingdom of heaven, or reign of harmony.
NIGHT. Darkness; doubt; fear.
NOAH. A corporeal mortal; knowledge of the nothingness of material things and of the immortality of all that is spiritual.
OIL. Consecration; charity; gentleness; prayer; heavenly inspiration.
PHARISEE. Corporeal and sensuous belief; self-righteousness; vanity; hypocrisy.
PISON (river). The love of the good and beautiful, and their immortality.
PRINCIPLE. See chapter on Recapitulation, page 465.
PROPHET. A spiritual seer; disappearance of material sense before the conscious facts of spiritual Truth.
PURSE. Laying up treasures in matter; error.
RED DRAGON. Error; fear; inflammation; sensuality; subtlety; animal magnetism; envy; revenge.
RESURRECTION. Spiritualization of thought; a new and higher idea of immortality, or spiritual existence; material belief yielding to spiritual understanding.
REUBEN (Jacob’s son). Corporeality; sensuality; delusion; mortality; error.
RIVER. Channel of thought.
When smooth and unobstructed, it typifies the course of Truth; but muddy, foaming, and dashing, it is a type of error.
ROCK. Spiritual foundation; Truth. Coldness and stubbornness.
SALVATION. Life, Truth, and Love understood and demonstrated as supreme over all; sin, sickness, and death destroyed.
SEAL. The signet of error revealed by Truth
SERPENT (ophis, in Greek; nacash, in Hebrew). Subtlety; a lie; the opposite of Truth, named error; the first statement of mythology and idolatry; the belief in more than one God; animal magnetism; the first lie of limitation; finity; the first claim that there is an opposite of Spirit, or good, termed matter, or evil; the first delusion that error exists as fact; the first claim that sin, sickness, and death are the realities of life. The first audible claim that God was not omnipotent and that there was another power, named evil, which was as real and eternal as God, good.
SHEEP. Innocence; inoffensiveness; those who follow their leader.
SHEM (Noah’s son). A corporeal mortal; kindly affection; love rebuking error; reproof of sensualism.
SON. The Son of God, the Messiah or Christ. The son of man, the offspring of the flesh. ” Son of a year.”
SOULS. See chapter on Recapitulation, page 466.
SPIRIT. Divine substance; Mind; divine Principle; all that is good; God; that only which is perfect, everlasting, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinite.
SPIRITS. Mortal beliefs; corporeality; evil minds; supposed intelligences, or gods; the opposites of God; errors; hallucinations. (See page 466.)
SUBSTANCE. See chapter on Recapitulation, page 594-26 468.
SUN. The symbol of Soul governing man,–of Truth, Life, and Love.
SWORD. The idea of Truth; justice. Revenge; anger.
TARES. Mortality; error; sin; sickness; disease; death.
TEMPLE. Body; the idea of Life, substance, and intelligence; the superstructure of Truth; the shrine of Love; a material superstructure, where mortals congregate for worship.
THUMMIM. Perfection; the eternal demand of divine Science.
The Urim and Thummim, which were to be on Aaron’s breast when he went before Jehovah, were holiness and purification of thought and deed, which alone can fit us for the office of spiritual teaching.
TIME. Mortal measurements; limits, in which are summed up all human acts, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, knowledge; matter; error; that which begins before, and continues after, what is termed death, until the mortal disappears and spiritual perfection appears.
TITHE. Contribution; tenth part; homage; gratitude. A sacrifice to the gods.
UNCLEANLINESS. Impure thoughts; error; sin; dirt.
UNGODLINESS. Opposition to the divine Principle and its spiritual idea.
UNKNOWN. That which spiritual sense alone comprehends, and which is unknown to the material senses.
Paganism and agnosticism may define Deity as “the great unknowable;” but Christian Science brings God much nearer to man, and makes Him better known as the All-in-all, forever near.
Paul saw in Athens an altar dedicated “to the unknown God.” Referring to it, he said to the Athenians: “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.” (Acts xvii. 23.)
URIM. Light.
The rabbins believed that the stones in the breastplate of the high-priest had supernatural illumination, but Christian Science reveals Spirit, not matter, as the illuminator of all. The illuminations of Science give us a sense of the nothingness of error, and they show the spiritual inspiration of Love and Truth to be the only fit preparation for admission to the presence and power of the Most High.
VALLEY. Depression; meekness; darkness.
“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” (Psalm xxiii. 4.)
Though the way is dark in mortal sense, divine Life and Love illumine it, destroy the unrest of mortal thought, the fear of death, and the supposed reality of error. Christian Science, contradicting sense, maketh the valley to bud and blossom as the rose.
VEIL. A cover; concealment; hiding; hypocrisy. The Jewish women wore veils over their faces in token of reverence and submission and in accordance with Pharisaical notions.
The Judaic religion consisted mostly of rites and ceremonies. The motives and affections of a man were of little value, if only he appeared unto men to fast. The great Nazarene, as meek as he was mighty, rebuked the hypocrisy, which offered long petitions for blessings upon material methods, but cloaked the crime, latent in thought, which was ready to spring into action and crucify God’s anointed. The martyrdom of Jesus was the culminating sin of Pharisaism. It rent the veil of the temple. It revealed the false foundations and superstructures of superficial religion, tore from bigotry and superstition their coverings, and opened the sepulchre with divine Science, – immortality and Love.
WILDERNESS. Loneliness; doubt; darkness. Spontaneity of thought and idea; the vestibule in which a material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence.
WILL. The motive-power of error; mortal belief; animal power. The might and wisdom of God.
“For this is the will of God.” (I Thessalonians iv. 3.)
Will, as a quality of so-called mortal mind, is a wrongdoer; hence it should not be confounded with the term as applied to Mind or to one of God’s qualities.
WIND. That which indicates the might of omnipotence and the movements of God’s spiritual government, encompassing all things. Destruction; anger; mortal passions.
The Greek word for wind (pneuma) is used also for spirit, as in the passage in John’s Gospel, the third chapter, where we read: “The wind [pneuma] bloweth where it listeth. . . . So is every one that is born of the Spirit [pneuma].” Here the original word is the same in both cases, yet it has received different translations, as in other passages in this same chapter and elsewhere in the New Testament. This shows how our Master had constantly to employ words of material significance in order to unfold spiritual thoughts. In the record of Jesus’ supposed death, we read: “He bowed his head, and gave up the ghost;” but this word ghost is pneuma. It might be translated wind or air, and the phrase is equivalent to our common statement, “He breathed his last.” What Jesus gave up was indeed air, an etherealized form of matter, for never did he give up Spirit, or Soul.
WINE. Inspiration; understanding. Error; fornication; temptation; passion.
YEAR. A solar measurement of time; mortality; space for repentance.
“One day is with the Lord as a thousand years.” (II Peter iii. 8.)
One moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, is a foretaste of eternity. This exalted view, obtained and retained when the Science of being is understood, would bridge over with life discerned spiritually the interval of death, and man would be in the full consciousness of his immortality and eternal harmony, where sin, sickness, and death are unknown. Time is a mortal thought, the divisor of which is the solar year. Eternity is God’s measurement of Soulfilled years.
YOU. As applied to corporeality, a mortal; finity.
ZEAL. The reflected animation of Life, Truth, and Love. Blind enthusiasm; mortal will.
ZION. Spiritual foundation and superstructure; inspiration; spiritual strength. Emptiness; unfaithfulness; desolation.
Chapter XVIII – Fruitage
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.- JESUS.
That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God.–PAUL.
Let us get up early to the vineyards: let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth.–SOLOMON’S SONG.
THOUSANDS of letters could be presented in testimony of the healing efficacy of Christian Science and particularly concerning the vast number of people who have been reformed and healed through the perusal or study of this book.
For the assurance and encouragement of the reader, a few of these letters are here republished from THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE JOURNAL and CHRISTIAN SCIENCE SENTINEL. The originals are in the possession of the Editor, who can authenticate the testimonials which follow.
RHEUMATISM HEALED
I was a great sufferer from a serious form of rheumatic trouble, my hands being affected to such an extent that it was impossible for me even to dress without assistance. The trouble finally reached the knees, and I became very lame and had to be assisted in and out of bed. I went to the different health resorts for the benefit I hoped to derive from the baths and waters that were prescribed by physicians, but found no permanent relief. I was placed under an X-ray examination, and was told that the joints were becoming ossified. I then consulted a celebrated specialist, who after a thorough examination said my condition would continue to grow worse and that I would become completely helpless.
At that time a copy of “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mrs. Eddy was loaned me. I read it more from curiosity than with the thought of any physical benefit. As the truth was unfolded to me, I realized that the mental condition was what needed correcting, and that the Spirit of truth which inspired this book was my physician. My healing is complete, and the liberation in thought is manifest in a life of active usefulness rather than the bondage of helpless invalidism and suffering. I owe to our beloved Leader, Mrs. Eddy, gratitude which words cannot express. Her revelation of the practical rather than the merely theoretical application of Jesus’ words, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” proved to be my redeemer. I did not even have to apply to a practitioner, but am most grateful for the helpful words of loving friends.–E. B. B., Pasadena, Cal.
ASTIGMATISM AND HERNIA HEALED
It is nearly five years since I bought my first copy of Science and Health, the reading of which cured me of chronic constipation, nervous headache, astigmatism, and hernia, in less than four months.
Where would I be now, had not this blessed truth been brought to me by much persuasion of a very dear friend? I certainly should have been deep in the slough of despond, if not in the grave. Am I truly thankful for all the good that has come to me and mine? I try to let my works testify of that; but to those whom I do not meet in person, I can truly say, Yes; I am indeed more thankful than words can express for the glorious healing that has come to me, both physical, mental, and moral, and I also convey herein, my song of gratitude to the dear Leader who has through her fidelity to Truth enabled me to touch at least the hem of Christ’s garment.–B. S. J., Sioux City, Iowa.
SUBSTANCE OF LUNGS RESTORED
It was about fifteen years ago that Christian Science first came to my notice. At that time I had been a chronic invalid for a good many years. I had acute bowel trouble, bronchitis, and a number of other troubles. One physician had told me that my lungs were like wet paper, ready to tear at any time, and I was filled with fear, as my mother, two brothers, and a sister had been victims of consumption. I tried many physicians and every material remedy that promised help, but no help came until I found a copy of Mrs. Eddy’s book, Science and Health. The book was placed in my hands by one who did not then appreciate it, and I was told that it would be hard for me to understand it. I commenced reading it with this thought, but I caught beautiful glimpses of Truth, which took away my fear and healed me of all those diseases, and they have never returned.
I would also like to tell how I was healed of a sprained ankle. The accident occurred in the morning, and all that day and during the night I gave myself Christian Science treatment, as best I could. The next morning it seemed to be no better, being very sore, badly swollen, and much discolored. Feeling that I had done all I could, I decided to stop thinking about it. I took my copy of Science and Health and began reading. Very soon I became so absorbed in the book that I forgot all about my ankle; it went entirely out of my thought, for I had a glimpse of all God’s creation as spiritual, and for the time being lost sight of my material selfhood. After two hours I laid the book down and walked into another room. When next I thought of my ankle, I found it was not hurting me. The swelling had gone down, the black and blue appearance had nearly vanished, and it was perfectly well. It was healed while I was “absent from the body” and “present with the Lord.” This experience was worth a great deal to me, for it showed me how the healing is done.–C. H., Portland, Or .
FIBROID TUMOR HEALED IN A FEW DAYS
My gratitude for Christian Science is boundless. I was afflicted with a fibroid tumor which weighed not less than fifty pounds, attended by a continuous hemorrhage for eleven years. The tumor was a growth of eighteen years.
I lived in Fort Worth, Tex., and I had never heard of Christian Science before leaving there for Chicago in the year 1887. I had tried to live near to God, and I feel sure He guided me in all my steps to this healing and saving truth. After being there several weeks I received letters from a Texas lady who had herself been healed, and who wrote urging me to try Christian Science. Changing my boarding-place, I met a lady who owned a copy of Science and Health, and in speaking to her of having seen the book, she informed me she had one, and she got it and told me I could read it. The revelation was marvelous and brought a great spiritual awakening. This awakened sense never left me, and one day when walking alone it came to me very suddenly that I was healed, and I walked the faster declaring every step that I was healed. When I reached my boarding-place, I found my hostess and told her I was healed. She looked the picture of amazement. The tumor began to disappear at once, the hemorrhage ceased, and perfect strength was manifest.
There was no joy ever greater than mine for this Christ-cure, for I was very weary and heavy laden. I thought very little of either sleeping or eating, and my heart was filled with gratitude, since I knew I had touched the hem of his garment.
I must add that the reading of Science and Health, and that alone, healed me, and it was the second copy I ever saw.–S. L., Fort Worth, Tex.
INSANITY AND EPILEPSY HEALED
While an inmate of the State asylum for the insane at Middletown, Conn., an epileptic, and at times confined to my bed with bilious attacks, pronounced incurable by the doctors (at least six in number), the book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mrs. Eddy was placed in my hands. After reading a few pages, I became very much impressed with the truth therein stated, and although I was surrounded with opposition, I knew that “underneath are the everlasting arms.” Since that time–past the middle of the year 1899–I have kept pressing on, until I have been healed by reading Science and Health. At times I was beset by what seemed unconquerable opposition, until the first week in October, 1904, when, upon going to my home in Darien for a visit, I was given my liberty, and I am now earning my living in this city. After having been subject to epileptic attacks since 1892, and at one time pronounced dying by the doctor in charge, I am now well. I have had no fit, or symptoms of any, since the first week in May, 1904.
I trust that this testimony to the healing power of Truth, realized by reading Science and Health (for I had no treatment), may reach the eye of some to whom the battle seems long, and inspire them with fresh courage and a realization of the worth of the victory. I am filled with inexpressible gratitude and love to God, and to Mrs. Eddy.–Mrs. B. B. C., Stamford, Conn.
A CASE OF MENTAL SURGERY
I have felt for some time I should give my experience in mental surgery. In May, 1902, going home for lunch, on a bicycle, and while riding down a hill at a rapid gait, I was thrown from the wheel, and falling on my left side with my arm under my head, the bone was broken about half-way between the shoulder and elbow. While the pain was intense, I lay still in the dust, declaring the truth and denying that there could be a break or accident in the realm of divine Love, until a gentleman came to assist me, saying, he thought I had been stunned. I was only two and a half blocks from home, so I mounted my wheel again and managed to reach it. On arriving there I lay down and asked my little boy to bring me our textbook. He immediately brought Science and Health, which I read for about ten minutes, when all pain left.
I said nothing to my family of the accident, but attended to some duties and was about half an hour late in returning to the office, this being my only loss of time from work. My friends claimed that the arm had not been broken, as it would have been impossible for me to continue my work without having it set, and carrying it in a sling until the bone knit together. Their insistence almost persuaded me that I might have been mistaken, until one of my friends invited me to visit a physician’s office where they were experimenting with an X-ray machine. The physician was asked to examine my left arm to see if it differed from the ordinary. On looking through it, he said, “Yes, it has been broken, but whoever set it made a perfect job of it, and you will never have any further trouble from that break.” My friend then asked the doctor to show how he could tell where the break had been. The doctor pointed out the place as being slightly thicker at that part, like a piece of steel that had been welded. This was he first of several cases of mental surgery that have come under my notice, and it made a deep impression on me.
For the benefit of others who may have something similar to meet, I will say that I have overcome almost constant attacks of sick headaches, extending back to my earliest recollection.–L. C. S., Salt Lake City, Utah.
CATARACT QUICKLY CURED
I wish to add my testimony to those of others, and hope that it may be the means of bringing some poor sufferer to health, to happiness, and to God. I was healed through simply reading this wonderful book, Science and Health. I had been troubled periodically for many years with sore eyes, and had been to many doctors, who called the disease iritis and cataract. They told me that my eyes would always give me trouble, and that I would eventually lose my sight if I remained in an office, and advised me to go under an operation. Later on I had to wear glasses at my work, also out of doors as I could not bear the winds, and my eyes were gradually becoming worse. I could not read for longer than a few minutes at a time, otherwise they would smart severely. I had to rest my eyes each evening to enable me to use them the next day; in fact gas-light was getting unbearable because of the pain, and I made home miserable. A dear brother told me about Christian Science, and said that if I would read Science and Health i would help me. He procured for me the loan of the book. The first night I read it, it so interested me I quite forgot all about my eyes until my wife remarked that it was eleven o’clock. I found that I had been reading this book for nearly four hours, and I remarked immediately after, “I believe my eyes are cured,” which was really the case. The next day, on looking at my eyes, my wife noticed that the cataract had disappeared. I put away my outdoor glasses, which I have not required since, and through the understanding gained by studying Christian Science I have been able to do away with my indoor glasses also, and have had no return of pain in my eyes since. This is now a year and a half ago.–G. F. S., Liverpool, England.
VALVULAR HEART DISEASE HEALED
Fourteen years ago my heart awoke to gratitude to God and the dear Leader at the same time. After a patient and persistent effort of three months’ duration, to procure a copy of Science and Health (during which time I had visited every bookstore, and many of the second-hand bookstores in the city of St. Paul), and had failed to find it, I at last remembered that the stranger who told me I might be healed, had mentioned a name, and McVicker’s Theatre Building in Chicago as being in some way connected with the work. I sent there for information regarding a book called Health and Science, and the return mail brought me the book, Science and Health, and in it I at once found sure promise of deliverance from valvular heart disease, with all the accompaniments, such as extreme nervousness, weakness, dyspepsia, and insomnia. I had suffered from these all my life, finding no permanent relief, even, in material remedies, and no hope of cure at any time. Only those who have been healed in such bondage and have been l berated by the same means, can know the eager joy of the first perusal of that wonderful book.
Half a day’s reading convinced me that I had found the way to holiness and health. I read on, thinking only of the spiritual enlightenment, content to wait until I should be led to some person who would heal me; but old things had passed away, and all things had become new. I was completely healed before I had met a Scientist, or one who knew anything about Christian Science, and before I had read a line of any other Christian Science literature except one leaf of a tract; so it is absolutely certain that the healing was entirely impersonal, as was also the teaching, which enabled me to begin at once demonstrating the power of Truth to destroy all forms of error.–E. J. W., North Yakima, Wash.
THE TRUE PHYSICIAN FOUND
It is with a deep sense of gratitude that I send the particulars of my healing through Christian Science. While visiting friends in the southwestern part of Ontario, about three years ago, my attention was called to Christian Science and the wonderful healing it was doing. I had lived in New York for twenty-five years, but had never heard of Christian Science before, to my recollection.
Up to that time, for seventeen years, I had suffered with indigestion and gastritis in the worst form, often being overcome from a seeming pressure against the heart. I had asthma for four years, also had worn glasses for four years. It seemed to me that I had swallowed every known medicine to relieve my indigestion, but they only gave me temporary benefit. I purchased a copy of Science and Health, and simply from the reading of that grand book I was completely healed of all my physical ailments in two weeks’ time. I have used no medicine from that day to this, and with God’s help, and the wonderful light revealed to me through the reading of Mrs. Eddy’s book, I never expect to again. I used to smoke eight or ten cigars a day, and also took an occasional drink, but the desire for these has gone,–I feel forever. I travel on the road, and am constantly being invited to indulge, but it is no effort to abstain, and in many instances I find that my refusal helps others.
While I fully appreciate the release from my physical troubles, this pales into insignificance in comparison with the spiritual uplifting Christian Science has brought me. I had not been inside a church for more than ten years, to attend regular services, until I entered a Christian Science church. What I saw and realized there, seemed so genuine that I loved Christian Science from the very start. I have never taken a treatment,–every inch of the way has been through study and practical demonstration, and I know that all can do the same thing if they will try.
Since I have been in Science I have overcome a case of ulcerated tooth in one night through the reading of Science and Health; also a severe attack of grip in thirty-six hours by obeying the Scripture saying, “Physician, heal thyself.”–B. H. N., New York, N. Y.
CANCER AND CONSUMPTION HEALED
I was a great sufferer for many years from internal cancer and consumption. I was treated by the best of physicians in New York, Minneapolis, and Duluth, and was finally given up as incurable, when I heard of Christian Science. A neighbor who had been healed of consumption, kindly loaned me Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, which I read and became interested in. In three months’ time, I was healed, the truth conveyed to me by this book being the healer, and not only of these diseases, but I was made whole mentally as well. I have not been in bed one day since, or rather in eleven years. I have had many good demonstrations during this time, have passed through many a “fiery trial,” but this blessed truth has caused me to stand, at times seemingly alone, and God was with me.
I will mention a demonstration of painless childbirth which I have had since coming to Idaho. Perhaps it may help some sister who is looking through the Journal for a demonstration of this kind, as I was before my baby came. Good help being scarce here, I did my housework up to the time I was confined, and was in perfect health. I awoke my husband one morning at five o’clock, and at half past five baby was born, no one being present but my husband and myself. It was quite a surprise to the rest of the family to see me sitting by the fire with a new baby on my lap. My son got the breakfast, of which I ate heartily; at noon I joined the family in the dining-room. I was out on the porch the second day, around the yard the third day, and have been perfectly well ever since, which has been now over three years. To one who had previously passed through agony untold, with a physician in attendance, this seemed wonderful. I hope this will interest some one who is seeking the truth, and I wish to express my sincere love for our beloved Leader, who has given us the ” Key to the Scriptures.”–E. C. C., Lewiston, Idaho.
A REMARKABLE CASE
Nine years ago my only child was hovering between life and death. Some of the best physicians in Boston had pronounced his case incurable, saying that if he lived he would always be an invalid and a cripple. One of the diseases was gastric catarrh. He was allowed to eat but very few things, and even after taking every precaution, he suffered to the extent that he would lie in spasms for half a day. He also had rickets; physicians saying that there was not a natural bone in his body.
It was while he was in what seemed to be his greatest agony, and when I was in the darkest despair, that I first heard of Christian Science. The bearer of the joyful tidings could only tell me to come and hear of the wonderful things that Christian Science was doing. I accepted the invitation, for I was willing to try anything to save my child, and the following Friday evening I attended my first meeting, which was in The Mother Church of Christ, Scientist. Long before the service began every seat was filled, which was amazing to me, being an ordinary weekly meeting, and that night I realized from the testimonies given that Christian Science was the religion for which I had been searching for years. The next day I went to find a practitioner, but was unable to get the one who had been recommended, he being too busy. On my way home I thought of some of the testimonies which I had heard the night before,–of people being healed by simply reading Science and Health. I resolved at once to borrow a copy, and not dreaming of the sacrifice that my friend would make by conferring such a favor, I went and asked her for a loan of Science and Health. I never saw any one part so reluctantly with a book as my friend did with her copy of the textbook.
I read it silently and audibly, day and night, in my home, and although I could not seem to understand it, yet the healing commenced to take place at once. The little mouth which had been twisted by spasms grew natural and the child was soon able to be up, playing and romping about the house as any child should. About this time we decided to move to the far West.
I was young in Science at the time, and my husband greatly feared that the journey would cause a relapse for the child, but instead, he continued to improve. I constantly read the Bible, Science and Health, and Miscellaneous Writings, the two weeks we traveled, and we were the only ones in our car who, throughout the journey, did not get train sick. The child’s limbs grew perfectly straight, he ate anything he wanted, and for years he has been a natural, healthy child in every way. He has passed through some of the worst forms of contagion untouched and unharmed.
I had been reading Science and Health several months, before I gave any thought to myself and my numerous complaints. I had never been very strong, and some of my ailments were supposed to be hereditary and chronic, hence I dragged through many tedious years with a belief in medical laws and hereditary laws resting upon me.
Just before I commenced reading Science and Health I spent a half day in having my eyes examined by one of the leading oculists in Boston. His verdict was that my eyes were in a dreadful condition, and that I would always need to wear glasses. In the meantime I commenced to read Science and Health, and when I thought of my eyes, I had no need for glasses. The years that I have been in Science I have used my eyes incessantly, night as well as day, doing all kinds of trying work and without requiring the aid of glasses. I was healed of all my complaints whilst seeking the truth for my child, and many of them have never returned. Those that appeared simply came to the surface to be destroyed. Teeth have been restored and facial blemishes removed, unconsciously, simply by reading Science and Health. All of this is, however, nothing to compare with the spiritual uplifting which I have received, and I have everything to be thankful for.–M. T. W., Los Angeles, Cal.
INTENSE SUFFERING OVERCOME
For about five years I was afflicted with sciatic rheumatism, in such a severe form that my body was drawn out of shape. When able to be around, I walked with the assistance of a cane. The attacks were periodical, recurring every few months; any exposure to rain or dampness would bring one. At one time I was in bed eleven weeks, suffering intensely all the time except when relieved by hypodermic injections. When I had these attacks, my regular physician was always in attendance. My daughter consulted another physician, who said there would have to be an operation which would include the exposing and scraping of the sciatic nerve. There was also another physician who, knowing of the case, examined my heart and claimed that it was weak and that I was liable to pass on at any time from heart trouble.
After suffering three years I heard of Christian Science, but did not avail myself of it for two years, when I decided to give up all other means and rely wholly upon it. It was not convenient to call a practitioner, so I took Science and Health and applied its teachings as best I could. In three days the trouble completely left me and there has never been the slightest return. My health has been good ever since, and I am at present in perfect physical health. I have been benefited in every way by Christian Science, physically, mentally, and spiritually, and would not be without my understanding of it for anything.–Mrs. E. A. K., Billings, Mont.
HEALED OF RHEUMATISM AND BRIGHT’S DISEASE
I am very thankful to God for what He has done for me. I was suddenly left alone, with many troubles and trials, and I took up the study of the Bible. I was trying to understand it, prior to joining some church, as it seemed to me this would be expected. I had attended all sorts of churches from my childhood up, but never could find any that met my need. As time passed on, my condition became very alarming. Sciatic rheumatism, that had troubled me for some years, became so severe I could scarcely do anything.
Then there appeared some complications, so distressing that I was unable to walk far, and had to sit down frequently by the way. I thought I had Bright’s disease,–such excruciating pains, no tongue could tell my sufferings. With all these things upon me, death seemed very near. I had never joined any church, and I thought it now too late, as I would have to wait six months on probation, and I would be dead before that.
About this time I made some inquiries of my sister in reference to Christian Science, as she had already turned to that faith, and I soon found that it was just what I had been looking for. I saw at once that it declared the truth and nothing but the truth. I commenced reading Science and Health, also the New Testament. I wanted to find out what Jesus said, as I did not expect then to live long. I did not go to the meetings, nor did I read Science and Health to be cured,–not thinking of that,–but to be saved from an everlasting hell hereafter. My sister urged me to have a practitioner, but I kept on reading, and praying to God in silence, and what happened? Where had the diseases gone? I persisted in reading Science and Health, together with the Bible, with the knowledge that God as revealed by Christ Jesus can do everything, that He made everything that was made, that He can and does heal the afflicted. He has healed me, thanks to His most holy name.–G. J. H., Charleston, Ill.
GRATEFUL FOR MANY BLESSINGS
In the year 1901, Christian Science found me a hopeless invalid. I had suffered for seven years previous with a very painful back, the result of an operation. I could get no rest or sleep at night, as I could not lie down, but had to sit propped in a chair with pillows around me. Only those who have suffered as I did can know the full misery of it. I had come to the end of material means and never hoped to get well. One day, however, while out walking, it was my good fortune to come to a Christian Scientist’s house, and there the teaching was explained to me. I was advised to buy Science and Health, which I did, and the study of this book has healed my back entirely. Christian Science has also cured me of long-standing catarrh of the throat, and neuralgia with which I had been afflicted from childhood. Before coming into Science I had doctored with three of the best physicians in Seattle, but none could give me relief.
I am no longer a sufferer, but rejoice exceedingly in Christian Science. God’s promise has been fulfilled to me, ” But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.”–E. O., Georgetown, Wash.
FREED FROM NEURASTHENIC AND OTHER TROUBLES
Christian Science found in me a minister’s son who had failed to profit by continuous teaching in the old thought. Some years ago I was pronounced by a professor of materia medica, whose works are in general use, a neurasthenic. I had been in this condition more or less for eight years, and up to two years ago, when Christian Science was first brought to my attention (thanks to Almighty God) through a kind friend, I was almost constantly taking medicine and had in all eleven physicians who undoubtedly did their best, but without avail, not withstanding almost all known drugs were prescribed, and further I had tried very many patent medicines. I was also put through forms of hygienic treatment and other things that offered inducements. At the time of coming into Science I was taking three times daily forty minims of cod-liver oil and three of creosote, also three drops of Fowler’s solution of arsenic, and on the month or so previous had bought eighteen dollars’ worth of patent medicine. I was restricted to the simplest means of diet,–all stews, fries, sweets, berries, and tomatoes I had not touched for two years.
I started to read Science and Health, and before I had half finished the book once I was eating everything that any one does. I read the book eleven times straight ahead and many times skipping about. The book has done the work and I am a well man.–C. E. M., Philadelphia, Pa.
MANY ILLS OVERCOME
I have received much help, spiritually and physically, through Christian Science. I had what the doctors diagnosed as muscular rheumatism, dropsy, and constipation of thirty years’ standing. A dear friend whom I had known as an invalid had been healed by Christian Science and advised me to read Science and Health. I did so, having a desire to know the truth. One of my troubles was that I could not sleep. I began reading the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, and troubles of every kind disappeared before I had read Science and Health through. The thought came, What about the old remedies? but truth prevailed, and I took all the material remedies I had and threw them away. That was seven years ago, and I have not had any use for them since. My husband was healed of the tobacco habit of fifty years’ standing, also of kidney trouble, by reading Science and Health. I have not words to express the gratitude I feel to-day for the many blessings that have come to our home.–Mrs. M. K. O., Seattle, Wash.
A HELPFUL HEALING
I became interested in Christian Science about eleven years ago, and was healed of neuralgia of the stomach, from which I had suffered from a child. As I grew older, the spells became more frequent and more severe; the only relief physicians could give me was by hypodermic injections of morphine. Finally, after each spell, I would be prostrated for a day or two with the after-effect of the morphine. I was entirely healed of this trouble through the study of Science and Health. I think I never realized what fear meant until I began to try and put into practice my understanding of Christian Science for my children. I have proved, however, many times, that fear can neither help nor hinder in our demonstration of truth. The first time I realized this was in the overcoming of a severe case of croup for my little boy. I was awakened one night by the sound that seems to bring terror to every mother’s heart, and found the little fellow sitting up in bed, gasping for breath. I got up, took him in my arms, and went i to the next room. My first thought was, “O if only there was another Christian Scientist in town!” But there was not, and the work must be done and done quickly. I tried to treat him, but was so frightened I could not think; so I picked up Science and Health, which lay on the table beside me, and began reading aloud. I had read but a few lines when these words came to me as though a voice spoke, “The word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword.” Almost immediately after, the little one said, “Mamma, sing ‘Shepherd,’ “–our Leader’s hymn, that both the big and the little children love. I began singing, and commencing with the second line, the little voice joined me. I shall never forget the feeling of joy and peace that came over me, when I realized how quickly God’s word, through Science and Health and the beautiful hymn, had accomplished the healing work. This is only one of many instances in which the power of God’s word to heal has been demonstrated in our home.–A. J. G., Riverside, Cal.
RELIEF FROM MANY ILLS
Paul said, “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” In my own case deafness has been overcome by an enlarged understanding of God’s word, as explained by Mrs. Eddy in Science and Health. Many times I have been enabled to turn to God, to know it was His will to help in trouble, and obtained the needed benefit. Catarrh has disappeared; tonsilitis, which very frequently laid me aside from duties in the schoolroom and home, is no longer manifest. When temptation comes (for Christian Science is both preventive and curative), I turn to that wonderful book, Science and Health, and my precious Bible, grown dearer since read in the new light of spiritual understanding, until I know that my mind is renewed, because the action is changed and the inflammation has abated.
Thus in my experience in Christian Science, I have seen the transformation begun, and Truth is able to perfect that which is begun in me so gloriously.–Mrs. C.A. McL., Brooklyn, Nova Scotia.
HEALTH AND PEACE ATTAINED
For fifteen years I was a great sufferer physically and mentally. Eminent physicians treated me for hereditary consumption, torpid liver, and many other diseases. I sought relief at famous springs, the ozone of Florida, and the pure air of Colorado, but in vain. My life was one ceaseless torture.
During all this time, however, I was an earnest seeker after Truth. I examined every religious teaching with a calm and unprejudiced attention. From an orthodox Protestant I became a skeptic, and a follower of Voltaire, Tom Paine, and Ingersoll; yet all the while I retained faith in a supreme intelligent Being who made all. Sick, weary, doubting, and despairing, I accidentally went into a Christian Science church in New York City, on a Wednesday evening, not knowing what kind of a place it was. Seeing a large number of people going into the building, I followed, supposing that a marriage ceremony had attracted the crowd. Being informed it was their regular Wednesday evening service, I inquired as to the denomination. I concluded that it was another new fad, but after investigation I procured a copy of Science and Health, promising I would read it carefully. I began reading the book on Tuesday and finished on Friday of the same week. I was still in the dark. I laid the book down, involuntarily closed my eyes, and silently prayed to God.
I remained in that attitude a few moments, when I felt like the mariner who had been tossed for days upon a boisterous sea, the clouds bending low, the billows rolling high, all nature wrapped in darkness; in his despair he kneels and commits his soul to God, when he suddenly beholds the North Star breaking through the clouds, enabling him to guide his ship to the shores of safety. Many things were made plain to me. I saw that there is one Fatherhood of God and one brotherhood of man; that though “once I was blind, now I see;” that there was no more pain, nor aches, no fear, nor indigestion. I slept that night like a babe and awoke next morning refreshed. There are now no traces whatever of my former complaint and I feel like a new being.–L. P., New York, N. Y.
HEALTH AND PEACE GAINED
About nine years ago I was drawn to Christian Science by a relative whose many afflictions had given place to health and harmony, and whose loving gratitude was reflected in every word and deed. The thought came to me, God indeed healeth all our diseases.
My first reading of Science and Health was without understanding. I was full of darkness and gloom, and it was laid aside for a time. The good seed had been sown, however, and erelong the reading was resumed, and with such interest that my afflictions disappeared “like mist before the morning sun.” Asthma (thought to be hereditary), neuralgia in an aggravated form, and besides these, the tobacco and liquor habit of many years’ standing left me. Bless the Lord, “He sent his word” and healed me,–for the reading of Science and Health brought to my consciousness the truth that makes free.–S., Shellman, Ga.
CONSUMPTION QUICKLY CURED
I became interested in Christian Science nearly five years ago through the healing of my wife of what the doctors called consumption in its last stages. I had tried everything that I could get in the way of materia medica, and every doctor would tell me nearly the same story about the case. At last they recommended for her only a higher, drier climate, and when she would be at her worst to give her something to quiet her.
I tried different climates, but she was no better, indeed worse. At last she struggled along until the first of March, 1899. She had taken to her bed again. For two days and nights she suffered, and I called a physician. He came and diagnosed the case, and said that he could do nothing for her but give her some morphine tablets to make her rest. I gave her two of them according to direction, and just before the time to give her the third, she called me to her bedside, and said, ” Don’t give me any more of that stuff, for it does me more harm than good,” so I turned and placed them in the fire, though I did not then know anything about Christian Science. We had heard of it, but that was all. I gave her the last tablet at eight o’clock that night, and about nine o’clock the next day a lady who had been healed in Christian Science visited her, and introduced her to this great truth. She accepted it and thought she would try it. The lady loaned her Science and Health. She got the book about ten o’clock that day and read it until dinner was called. She ate a hearty dinner, the first in about three days, and that same evening she dressed herself, walked into the dining-room, ate a hearty supper and enjoyed it. She slept well that night. She borrowed this lady’s copy of Science and Health two hours each day for eight days, and was healed. The first day that she read Science and Health she weighed about ninety-five pounds. Three months later she weighed one hundred and thirty-five pounds.–A. J. D., Houston, Tex.
A PROFITABLE STUDY
It may help others to know that some one was really healed of severe illness through Christian Science. It is over nine years since we first became interested in the Science, and it would be hard to find a healthier person than I am now. I can go all day, from morning till night, upheld by the thought that “they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.” I can truly say that I scarcely know what physical weariness is any more. Before I came into Science the physicians said that one lung was gone, and that the other was affected with tuberculosis; so, from their standpoint, there was little left for me to hope for. We had tried every remedy that they had suggested. I had gone to the mountains, but could not stay there on account of the altitude; and when they did not know what else to do, they said we would better go to England–that the ocean air would be beneficial. So we spent three months in the British Isles, and when I came back I seemed much better, but this only lasted a short time. In little more than a month I was worse than ever, and my mother was told that I had but a few weeks, or at most months, to live.
At that time, a lady, a stranger to us, suggested that we try Christian Science. There was no prejudice against it, as we did not even know what it was. We knew of no Scientists in the Western town where we were living, and when we were told that we could send to Kansas City for absent treatment, we thought it was absurd. We were then told that many people had been healed through the reading of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health, and to us this seemed a little worse than the absent treatment, but as we had tried everything we had heard of up to that time, my mother sent for the book.
It came in the middle of October and we began to read it together. It seemed to me from the first that it was something I had always believed, but did not know how to express–it seemed such a natural thing. My improvement was very gradual, but I felt I was recovering. After the Christmas holidays I started in at school and went the whole term without missing a day,–something I had never done before. I finished my school course without missing a day–in fact, I have not spent a day in bed since that time. I feel absolutely certain that I have two sound, healthy lungs now. The hollows in my chest have filled out, and I breathe perfectly on both sides; rarely have a cold to meet, and have not a sign of a cough.
People sometimes say, “Oh, well, maybe you never had consumption.” Well, I had all the symptoms, and they are every one gone through the reading of Science and Health.–E. L. B., Chicago, Ill.
HEALED OF INFIDELITY AND MANY PHYSICAL ILLS
I feel compelled to write my testimony and hope that I may be accepted as one more witness to the Truth as contained in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
In the year 1883 I first heard of Christian Science. I was sitting in a saloon in Leadville, Col., reading a daily paper of that place. My eyes lighted upon an article which spoke of some peculiar people in Boston who claimed to have discovered how to heal as Jesus healed. I do not remember much of the article, but those words stayed with me.
I had drifted out to Colorado from New York City (my home), where I had been under the treatment of many leading physicians. The last one, who was too honest to take my money knowing that he could not cure me, advised me to keep away from doctors and quit taking medicine, as nothing but death could cure me. My trouble was pronounced by some to be Bright’s disease, by others gravel on the kidneys with very acute inflammation of the bladder and prostate gland.
In the spring of 1888 my wife and myself were spending the evening at the house of a gentleman whose wife had been healed in the East by Christian Science. The gentleman took a book from its bookcase saying, “Here is a work on Christian Science.” It proved to be Science and Health. I knew as soon as I had read the title-page that this was the very book we wanted. We immediately sent for the book, and when it arrived we obeyed the angel and feasted on it. I was very much prejudiced against the Bible, and my first demonstration over self was to consent to read the four Gospels. My wife bought me a New Testament and I began to read it. What a change came over me! All my prejudice was gone in an instant! When I read the Master’s words, I caught his meaning and the lesson he tried to convey. It was not difficult for me to accept the whole Bible, for I could not help myself, I was just captured. The disease with which I had been troubled for years tormented me worse than ever for about six months, as if trying to turn me aside; but I lost all fear of it.
I kept up my study of Science and Health and the disease disappeared. I can honestly say that Science and Health was my only healer, and it has been my only teacher.–R. A. C., Los Angeles, Cal.
DISEASED EYES CURED
Christian Science came to me when I was a wreck, my body being completely covered with sores. My eyes were very bad, so that I sat in a darkened room for weeks together, most of the time in bed under opiates. The home doctor and a specialist said the disease of the eyes could not be cured, though they might help me for a while. I had one operation, and the doctor said if I took cold I would become totally blind. My suffering was beyond telling.
A clergyman called almost every day, and sat by my bed and wept, and my good, kind doctor shed tears many times. Finally, after a year of this terrible suffering, I was sent to Indiana, to a sister who had been healed of lung trouble by Christian Science. The first day I was there she read to me from the Bible and from “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mrs. Eddy, and I was healed. I knew that God was no respecter of persons, and when I saw what had been done for my sister, who was changed from being a mere frame to a strong, robust, healthy, rosy-cheeked woman, the cough all gone, I said, “God has as much for me, if I will accept it.” I was healed instantaneously by Christian Science, and am thankful to God for giving us this understanding through Mrs. Eddy, our beloved Leader. I am now in perfect health.–Mrs. F. S., Laurel, Miss.
THE TEXTBOOK HEALED ME
For twelve years previous to the fall of 1897 I had been under the care of a physician much of the time. Different opinions were given by them, as to the nature of the trouble, some diagnosing it as an abnormal growth, etc. I was healed through reading” Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mrs. Eddy. It was a clear case of transformation of the body by the renewal of the mind. I am perfectly well at the present time.–J. M. H., Omaha, Neb.
OBSTINATE STOMACH TROUBLE HEALED
There is no doubt that by far the greater number come to Christian Science by the way of physical healing, but there are those to whom this does not particularly appeal. In the hope that it may be of benefit to some such, and in gratitude for help received, I submit my own experience. Three years ago I knew nothing of Christian Science, aside from the knowledge gathered from the daily papers and current literature. When I thought of the subject at all, it was to class Christian Science with various human theories with which I could not be in sympathy, for they seemed to rely upon both good and evil. I had never known of a case of healing, had never read the textbook or heard of the Journal or Sentinel, but I would sometimes see people going into the Christian Science church. I was tired of trying to find anything satisfactory in religious belief, for it seemed as if God either could not or would not bring into harmony the terrible conditions existing in human society. I had quit using any form of prayer except the Lord’s Prayer, and even then omitted the words “lead us not into temptation.” How I longed to know just a little of the “why?” and “wherefore?” of it all.
Here is where Christian Science found me. I was thrown in contact with a dear friend of whom I had seen very little for a year or more, a thoroughly educated woman and a thinker. She told me she had taken some treatments in Christian Science for a physical trouble, and had become very much interested in the study of “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mrs. Eddy. She asked me if I would like to look at the book, and I said I would be glad to do so. The first chapter, “Prayer,” appealed to me from the first, and when I came to Mrs. Eddy’s spiritual sense of the Lord’s Prayer (Science and Health, p. 17), my interest was fully aroused. I knew that in a dim way I was learning what it means to “pray without ceasing.” Very soon I bought a book of my own, and with the help of our Lesson-Sermons, as given in the Quarterly, I began in earnest the study of Science and Health, in connection with the Bible.
I stood very much in need of physical healing at this time, having suffered for several years from an obstinate form of stomach trouble. So far as I know, I gave no thought to the benefits I might derive physically from the study, but I did believe this Science held the truth of things, and I was so absorbed in getting an understanding of the Principle that I thought very little of myself. After about three or four months’ study I realized that the stomach trouble was gone, and with it went other physical troubles, which have never returned. This healing was brought about by the earnest, conscientious seeking for the truth, as contained in the Bible and interpreted by our Leader in our textbook, Science and Health. I have since learned more of the Science of healing and have been able in a small way to help others in need. I have also learned that in living and loving is healing realized, and in reflecting divine Love I have the “signs following.”
When we think of the pure, loving, unselfish life Mrs. Eddy must have lived in order to become conscious of this truth and give it to us, words are a poor medium through which to express the gratitude which her followers feel for her. It is best expressed by obediently following her, even as she is following Christ.–H. T., Omaha, Neb.
DYSPEPSIA QUICKLY HEALED
It has occurred to me that I have had ample time to meditate on the many blessings which I have received through Christian Science, as it is now more than six years since I was entirely healed of dyspepsia as well as constipation in its worst form by the reading of Science and Health. So aggravated were the conditions that for three years or more I was unable to drink a glass of cold water. Everything that I drank had to be hot, and my only means of relief from the bowel trouble was hot water injections, for a period of more than three years.
I can truthfully say that I was permanently, and I might say instantly, healed of those two ailments by reading Science and Health as before stated, and in fact I do not think I had read more than thirty pages of this book when I ignored entirely the most rigid kind of diet. I ate and drank everything I wished without a single harmful effect from that time to this date, and there has not been a drop of medicine in our home for more than six years, in a family of five.
I have also seen the power of Truth manifested in our home by having our youngest child relieved of the most excruciating pain, and changed to his most playful mood, immediately upon notifying one of the faithful practitioners of this city. For all this I am endeavoring to be thankful to God and to our faithful Leader, Mrs. Eddy, whose pure and undefiled life enabled her to discover this precious truth for the benefit of all mankind.–M. C. McK., Denver, Col.
AFTER TWENTY YEARS’ SUFFERING
From early girlhood I was considered an invalid, having been injured by a hard fall while playing. The pain was intense for some time and for several hours I was unable to walk or stand alone. Later, a growing weakness of the back accompanied with sharp pains alarmed my parents, who called a physician, and he pronounced it spinal trouble. Then followed nearly twenty years of increased suffering, at times very severe. As years went by and I became a wife and mother, my suffering increased. Everything that medical skill could do was done, but finding no lasting benefit from anything, I lost hope of recovery.
When Christian Science found me I was under the doctor’s sentence that if I lived the week through I would become entirely helpless, not able to move hand or foot. My husband was a travelling man, and being urgently called home, he met an old friend on the train who asked why we did not try Christian Science. The reply, We know nothing of it, was followed by a brief explanation of its healing power and the benefit his family had received. This inspired my husband with new hope, and on his arrival at home he called on a practitioner, who recommended our getting Science and Health, which we did, but ignorance and the prejudice of old education produced such fear that I hid the book under the covers of the bed whenever the children came into the room, fearing that it was not of God and would injure them. God’s dear love was, however, more potent than these foolish fears, and the first day I read from its sacred pages I was convinced its teachings were the same truths as Jesus Christ had taught centuries ago. W en I had read a few pages, I reached out and threw my medicine from the open window at the head of my bed. I then turned back to the book and began reading again, when, lo, the Christ-idea dawned upon me, and I was healed instantaneously. I first noticed the spot in my back cooling, and soon I got out of bed. I continued to read eagerly; I felt as if I wanted to devour the healing truth, and drank it in as a thirsty plant does the gentle rain. When dinner was prepared, I walked out and ate a hearty meal with the family, to the amazement of all. We shall never forget what a joyful meal this was. How we did thank God for Christian Science!
As year after year has gone by, till twenty years have passed and the healing has remained perfect, I have grown to thank God with deeper sincerity that one brave woman was found pure enough to bring forth this Christ-healing again, to remain forever among men and to save suffering humanity from all disease and sin.–Mrs. P. L. H., Fairmont, Minn.
FROM DESPAIR TO HOPE AND JOY
I have often had a desire to make public what Christian Science has done for me, but I never could tell of all my blessings, they are so many. From childhood I was always sick, never knew one hour of rest, and was under the doctor’s care most of the time. I was living in the East at that time, and was advised to try change of climate, which I did. I came West with my family in the spring of the year, but instead of growing better I grew steadily worse, until at last I was obliged to keep my bed for nearly three years,–a great sufferer. My ailments were, it seemed, all that flesh is heir to, and were called incurable by the doctors; viz., Bright’s disease, and many others,–in the last stages. My case was known among physicians, many of whom were prominent specialists, as a most extreme one. Many, upon looking at me, would turn away with a wise shake of the head and say, “What keeps her alive?” My physicians, who were exceedingly kind and did all that lay within their power for me, gave me up and the death sentence was pronounced on me by all who attended me.
It was then I realized that “man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” The “little book” was handed me at this hour of great need. I read it, not thinking it would heal me, but, like a drowning man, I grasped at it. I read it, read it again, and soon found myself growing stronger; then I kept on reading and was perfectly healed of all the supposedly incurable diseases.–L. B., Austin, Minn.
TRUTH MAKES FREE
As the son of a physician, a graduate in pharmacy, and an ex-druggist, I had a perfect contempt for what I thought Christian Science to be. About six and a half years ago, however, having exhausted all material means at my command,–materia medica, electricity, gymnastics, cycling, and so on,–and being in a hopeless state, the study of Christian Science was taken up. I had been a sufferer from catarrh and sore throat for over thirty years, and in the last five were added several others, including dyspepsia, and bronchitis, and a loss in flesh of sixty pounds. I was completely healed, and regained health, strength, and flesh through the spiritual understanding of Christian Science, the result of about six weeks’ study. This good and perfect gift came to me through the careful and prayerful study of Christian Science, as revealed to the world to-day through Science and Health. The promise of Christ Jesus, “the truth shall make you free,” was fulfilled, and the past six years of health and harmony have been spent in striving to “hold fast that which is good.”
While most grateful for the physical healing, my gratitude for the mental and spiritual regeneration is beyond expression. When I learned that Jesus’ mission of healing sickness as well as sin did not end with his short stay upon earth, but is practical in all ages, my joy was unbounded. Having spent thousands in the old way, it seemed wonderful to be healed at such small cost as the price of the “little book” and a few weeks’ study. Every thought of prejudice immediately vanished before the proofs that Christian Science is indeed the elucidation and practical application of Jesus’ teachings, which are demonstrable truth, “The same yesterday, and to-day, and forever.”–C. N. C., Memphis, Tenn.
DEAF EARS UNSTOPPED
As a mother of a family my heart goes out in love and gratitude to that good woman we are privileged to call our Leader, for all she has done through her book for me and mine.
Ten years ago I was healed of hereditary deafness and catarrh of the head, simply through reading the book, Science and Health. For years previous I had consulted and taken treatment from some of the best specialists for the ear and throat, both in England and America, but grew worse all the time. I was then urged by a lady who had been healed through Christian Science to buy this book and study it. I did so very reluctantly, but had not read fifty pages before I felt I had indeed found the truth which makes free, and can truly say, from that time I have never had a return of the ailment.
That for which I am, however, most grateful, is the daily help it is to me in my household of young children. I am sure if mothers only knew what Christian Science truly means they would give all they possess to know it. We have seen croup, measles, fever, and various other children’s complaints, so-called, disappear like dew before the morning sun, through the application of Christian Science,–the understanding of God as ever-present and omnipotent. It has been proven to me without a doubt that God is a very present help in trouble, and what a blessed help this wonderful truth is in the training of our children, and how quickly the child grasps it.
Some time ago my little girl, then three years old, dislocated her shoulder. I was alone in the house at the time. The pain was so intense that she became faint. I treated her the best I knew how, but kept holding the thought that just as soon as some one came I would run for help. She seemed to grow worse and cried very much. I undressed her and tried to twist the arm into place, but it caused such suffering that I began to get afraid. Then like a flash came the thought, What would you do if you were out of the reach of a practitioner? Now is your time to prove God’s power and presence. With these thoughts came such a sense of calm and trustfulness that I lost all fear. I then asked the child if I should read to her; she said “Yes, mamma, read the truth-book.” I began reading aloud to her from Science and Health. In about half an hour I noticed she tried to lift the arm but screamed and became very pale. I continued to read aloud and again she made an effort to put some candy into her mouth. This time I noticed with joy that she almost reached her mouth before she felt the pain. I kept reading aloud to her until my sister and two boys came in, when she jumped off her bed, so delighted to see her brothers that she forgot her arm. She then began to tell her aunt that she had broken her arm and mamma treated it with the truth-book. When this happened, it was about 10.30 A. M. and by 3 P. M. she was playing out doors as though nothing had ever happened.–Mrs. M. G., Winnipeg, Man.
SAVED FROM INSANITY AND SUICIDE
A few years ago, while under a sense of darkness and despair caused by ill health and an unhappy home, Science and Health was loaned me with a request that I should read it.
At that time my daughter was given up by materia medica to die of lingering consumption, supposed to have been inherited. My own condition seemed even more alarming, as insanity was being manifested, and rather than go to an insane asylum, it seemed to me the only thing to do was to commit suicide. Heart trouble, kidney complaint, and continual headaches caused from female trouble were some of the many ailments I had to contend with. My doctor tried to persuade me to undergo an operation as a means of relief, but I had submitted to a severe operation ten years previous, and found only additional suffering as a result, so I would not consent.
When I began with Science and Health, I read the chapter on “Prayer” first, and at that time did not suppose it possible for me to remember anything I read, but felt a sweet sense of God’s protection and power, and a hope that I should at last find Him to be what I so much needed,–a present help in time of trouble. Before that chapter on “Prayer” was finished, my daughter was downstairs eating three meals a day, and daily growing stronger. Before I had finished reading the textbook she was well, but never having heard that the reading of Science and Health healed any one, it was several months before I gave God the glory.
One by one my many ailments left me, all but the headaches; they were less frequent, until at the end of three years the fear of them was entirely overcome.
Neither myself nor my daughter have ever received treatments, but the study of the Bible and Science and Health, the Christian Science textbook by Mrs. Eddy, has healed us and keeps us well.
While Christian Science was very new to me, I attended an experience meeting in First Church of Christ, Scientist, Chicago. A gentleman told of an unhappy woman who was about to separate from her husband. This gentleman had asked her if she did not love her husband. She replied, “No; when I married him I did, but not now.” He told her God made man in His image and likeness, and that He is perfect. He said to her, “Go home and see only God’s perfect man; you don’t need to love a sinful mortal such as you have been looking upon.” The lady followed his advice, as he told her there is no separation in divine Mind. In a short time peace and harmony were in her home, and both husband and wife became members of a Christian Science church.
This testimony was like a message from heaven to me. I had received many benefits from the study of Science and Health, but it had never dawned upon my darkened consciousness till then how wonderful our God is. I knew what had taken place in that home could take place in my unhappy home where there was neither rest nor peace.
I hopefully took up my cross, and step by step my burden grew lighter, as I journeyed along, realizing the presence of the Christ, Truth, that indeed makes us free. Not all at once did any outward change appear, but at the end of three years all was peace, all the members of the family attending church together and realizing that there is but one Mind.–E. J. B., Superior, Wis.
STOMACH TROUBLE HEALED
I was healed of stomach trouble of many years’ standing by reading Science and Health. My condition had reached the stage in which I had periodical attacks, that came on with greater frequency. I was a travelling salesman, and it was a common occurrence for me to have to call a physician to my hotel to administer morphine for an acute form of this disease. This became a regular thing at certain places, and these attacks always left me worse than before. As a result of the last one I lost a great deal in weight. I had tried many physicians and most of the usual remedies during these years of suffering, without any good result. Finally, as a last resort, I decided to try Christian Science, and I was healed by reading “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mrs. Eddy.
My health has been of the best since I was healed, now six years ago. In the family we have depended entirely on Christian Science for our healing, and have ever found it efficacious. We consider the physical healing, however, only incidental to the understanding of God and His goodness. This, together with our increased love for the Bible, is proving most valuable to us. We are humbly trying to live the lives that will prove our gratitude to God, and to our beloved Leader, Mrs. Eddy.–Charles E. Peck, St. Johnsbury, Vt.
FREED FROM MANY YEARS OF SUFFERING
In the spring of 1880 I was taken down with a severe attack of stomach trouble, was bedfast for three months, and not able to drive out for nearly six months. During this time I had three good doctors treating me. I gained a little in strength, but had very little relief from the stomach trouble. I was recommended to try mineral springs and did so, but with the same disappointment. I went to a sanitarium, but yet the stomach trouble prevailed. I had some friends who recommended patent medicines, but no healing came.
I worried along in this way for several years. Finally I read medicine nearly two years with a good doctor friend, especially for my own benefit, and during this time I had a severe attack of bladder trouble, and for fifteen years I suffered so severely at times that I thought life was not really worth living. In connection with these troubles I suffered every winter with rheumatism and the grip. I also had a growth coming on both eyes called cataract, which caused my eyes to be inflamed nearly all the time, and this growth had made such progress that it was causing my vision to be very dim when reading. Corns were not forgotten, as I was reminded of them very frequently, and for all these troubles I had tried every remedy I heard of that I was able to get, specialists included, without relief.
Thanks to a friend who took me in this hopeless, discouraged condition and led me to the light that never knows darkness, I got a copy of Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy and was healed in a short time by reading this work.–D. W. L., Anderson, Ind.
RELIEF FROM INTENSE SUFFERING
I became interested in Christian Science in 1901. For four or five years I had suffered with severe attacks which nothing but an opiate seemed to relieve. After one which I think was the worst I ever had, I consulted our family physician, who diagnosed my case as a dangerous kidney disease and said that no medicine could help me but that I must undergo a surgical operation. I continued to grow worse and went to see the physician again, and he advised me to consult a doctor who was connected with the city hospital of Augusta. This doctor made an examination and diagnosed the difficulty as something different but quite as serious. Meanwhile a friend offered me a copy of Science and Health. I said I did not care to read the book, but she was so urgent that I finally promised to do so. I received the book on Saturday, and on Sunday morning I sat down to read it. When I reached the place where Mrs. Eddy says she found this truth in the Bible, I began comparing the two books. I read passages which looked very reasonable to me, and said to myself, This is nearer to the truth than anything I have ever seen. I continued to read all day, stopping only long enough to eat my dinner. As I read on, everything became clearer to me, and I felt that I was healed. During the evening a neighbor came in, and I said, “I am healed, and that book has healed me.” I read on and was certainly healed. Eight days after my healing I did my own washing. This occurred in February, 1901. About six weeks after, I was called to care for my mother, who was under the care of my former physician. I again let him examine my side, as he wished to see if the trouble was still there. He said, “It is certainly gone.” I said to him, “Doctor, you told me I would never be a well woman unless I was operated upon; what has healed me?” He replied, “God has h aled you.”–S. H. L., North Pittston, Me.
GRATEFUL FOR MANY BLESSINGS
It is with sincere gratitude for the many blessings Christian Science has brought me, that I give this testimony. I first heard of Christian Science about fifteen years ago. A friend of mine was taking treatment for physical troubles, and was reading the textbook of Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. The title of the book appealed to me very strongly. I said to my friend, “If that is a Key to the Scriptures, I must have it.” I had long been a member of a Bible class in an orthodox Sabbath school, but I never felt satisfied with that which was taught; there was something lacking, I did not understand then what it was. I purchased a copy of Science and Health and began to study it. I wish I could express in words what that book brought me. It illumined the Bible with a glorious light and I began to understand some of the Master’s sayings, and tried to apply them.
I had had a longing to live a better Christian life for many years, and often wondered why I failed so utterly to understand the Bible. Now I knew; it was lack of spiritual apprehension.
I did not know at first that people were healed of disease and sin by simply reading Science and Health, but found after a while that such was the case. At that time I had many physical troubles, and one after another of these ills simply disappeared and I found that I had no disease,–I was perfectly free. The spiritual uplifting was glorious, too, and as I go on in the study of this blessed Science, I find I am gaining surely an understanding that helps me to overcome both sin and disease in myself and in others. My faith in good is increased and I know I am losing my belief in evil as a power equal to good. The pathway is not wearisome, because each victory over self gives stronger faith and a more earnest desire to press on.–E. J. R., Toledo, Ohio.
GRATEFUL FOR MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
About four years ago, after I had tried different ways and means to be relieved from bodily suffering, a faithful friend called my attention to the teaching of Christian Science. After some opposition, I decided to investigate it, with the thought that if this teaching would be helpful, it was meant for me as well as for others; if it did not afford any help, I could put it aside again, but that I would find out and be convinced.
After I had read Mrs. Eddy’s work, Science and Health, a few days, I found that my ailments had disappeared, and a rest had come to me which I had never before known. I had smoked almost incessantly, although I had often determined to use my will power and never smoke again, but had always failed. This desire as well as the desire for drink simply disappeared, and I wish to say here, that I received all these benefits before I had gained much understanding of what I was reading. Like a prisoner, who had been in chains for years, I was suddenly set free. I did not then know how the chain had been removed, but I had to acknowledge that it came through the reading of this book. I then felt an ardent desire to read more, and to know what this power was that had freed me in a few days of that which I had been trying for years to shake off and had failed. It then became clear to me that this was the truth which Jesus Christ taught and preached to free humanity almost two thousand years ago. It did not, however, o cur to me to apply it in my business affairs; on the contrary, I first thought that if I continued in my study I would have to retire from business.
This did not happen, however, for I gradually found that the little understanding of this wonderful teaching which I had acquired became a great help to me in my business. I became more friendly, more honest, more loving to my fellow-men; and I also acquired better judgment and was able to do the right thing at the right time. As a natural result my business improved. Before I knew anything of Christian Science my business had often been a burden to me, fear and worry deprived me of my rest. How different it is now! Through the study of the Bible, which now possesses unmeasurable treasures for me, and for our textbook, Science and Health, and the other works of our Leader, I receive peace and confidence in God and that insight into character which is necessary for the correct management of any business.–W. H. H., Bloomfield, Neb.
HEREDITARY DISEASE OF THE LUNGS CURED
For a long time I have been impelled to contribute a testimony of the healing power of Truth. As I read other testimonies and rejoice in them, some one may rejoice in mine. I was healed by reading Science and Health. By applying it, I found it to be the truth that Jesus taught,–the truth that sets free.
From childhood I had never known a well day. I was healed of lung trouble of long standing. Consumption was hereditary in our family, my mother and three brothers having passed on with it. The law of materia medica said that in a short time I must follow them. I also had severe stomach trouble of over eight years’ standing, during which time I always retired without supper, as the fear of suffering from my food was so great that I denied myself food when hungry. For over twenty years I had ovarian trouble, which was almost unbearable at times. It dated from the birth of my first child, and at one time necessitated an operation. I suffered with about all the ills that flesh is heir to: I had trouble with my eyes from a child; wore glasses for fourteen years, several oculists saying I would go blind, one declaring I would be blind in less than a year if I did not submit to an operation, which I refused to do.
But thanks be to God whose Truth reached me through the study of our textbook. Words fail to express what Christian Science has done for me in various ways, for my children, my home, my all. The physical healing is but a small part; the spiritual unfolding and uplifting is the “pearl of great price,” the half that has never been told.–Mrs. J. P. M., Kansas City, Mo.
TEXTBOOK APPRECIATED
It has been my privilege to have interviews with representatives of more than sixty per cent of the nations of this earth, under their own vine and fig-tree. I had never heard a principle understandingly advanced that would enable mankind to obey the apostolic command, “prove all things,” until Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was placed in my hands. I believe that the honest study of this book in connection with the Bible will enable one to “prove all things.”
I make this unqualified statement because of what my eyes have seen and my ears heard from my fellow-men of unquestioned integrity, and the positive proofs I have gained by the study of these books. Many supposed material laws that had been rooted and grounded in my mentality from youth have been overcome. It required some time for me to wake up to our Leader’s words in Miscellaneous Writings, p. 206: “The advancing stages of Christian Science are gained through growth, not accretion.” I had many disappointments and falls before I was willing to do the scientific work required to prove this statement; yet notwithstanding the cost to ourselves, I am convinced that we cannot do much credit to the cause we profess to love until we place ourselves in a position to prove God as He really is to us individually, and our relation to Him, by scientific work.
I wish to express loving gratitude to our Leader for the new edition of Science and Health. In studying this new edition one cannot help seeing the wisdom, love, and careful and prayerful thought expressed in the revision. Often the changing of a single word in a sentence makes the scientific thought not only more lucid to him who is familiar with the book, but also to those just coming into the blessed light. All honor to that God-loving, God-fearing woman, Mary Baker G. Eddy, whose only work is the work of love in the helping of mankind to help themselves; who has placed before her fellow-men understandingly, what man’s divine rights are, and what God really is.–H. W. B., Hartford, Conn.
RUPTURE AND OTHER SERIOUS ILLS HEALED
When I took up the study of Christian Science nearly three years ago, I was suffering from a very bad rupture of thirty-two years’ standing. Sometimes the pain was so severe that it seemed as if I could not endure it. These spells would last four or five hours, and while everything was done for me that could be done, no permanent relief came to me until I commenced reading Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. After I had once looked into it I wanted to read all the time. I was so absorbed in the study of the “little book” that I hardly realized when the healing came, but I was healed, not only of the rupture, but also of other troubles,–inflammatory rheumatism, catarrh, corns, and bunions.
I would never part with the book if I could not get another. I am seventy-seven years old, and am enjoying very good health.–Mrs. M. E. P., St. Johnsbury, Vt.
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER HEALED
When Christian Science came to me, I had been taking medicine every day for twenty years, on account of constipation. I had been treated by doctors and specialists; had taken magnetic treatments and osteopathy; had tried change of climate; had an operation in a hospital, and when I came out was worse than before. I was so discouraged, after I had tried everything I ever heard of, and was no better but rather grew worse, that it seemed as though I must give up trying to get well, when a friend suggested that I try Christian Science. I had heard that Christian Scientists healed by prayer, and I thought this must be the way Jesus had healed. I felt that this was all there was left for me to try. I sent for the book, Science and Health, and commenced to read it out of curiosity, not thinking or knowing that I could be helped by the reading, but thinking I must still take medicine and that I must also have treatment by a Scientist. I, however, dropped my medicine and read for three days; then a light began to shine in the darkness. I was healed of the trouble and have never had to take medicine since. I have studied Science and Health faithfully ever since, and other ailments have disappeared. My little daughter has also been healed and has learned to use this knowledge in her school work.–Mrs. O. R., Leadville, Col.
LIVER COMPLAINT HEALED
As my thoughts go back to the time when I believed I had nothing to live for, and when each morning’s awaking from sleep brought a sense of disappointment to find myself still among the living (for I had hoped each night that I closed my eyes in sleep that it would be the last time), my heart overflows with love and gratitude to God for our dear Leader who discovered this blessed truth and to the dear ones who have helped me so lovingly and patiently over many rough places.
Twelve years ago, I consulted a physician because I had noticed some odd-looking spots on one of my arms. He said they were liver spots, but that it was not worth while prescribing for those few, that I should wait until I was covered with them. About three months later, with the exception of my face and hands, I was covered with them. Then I became alarmed and called on another physician who prescribed for me, but be finally said he could do no more for me. Other physicians were consulted with no better results. Six years ago, friends advised me to see their family physician, and when I called on him he said he was positive he could cure me, so I asked him to prescribe for me. At the end of two years, after prescribing steadily, he said I was so full of medicine that he was afraid to have me take any more, and advised a rest. After having paid out a small fortune, I was no better, and very much discouraged.
Two years ago, having failed in business, I applied to one of my patrons for a furnished room where I could meet the few I still had left. This lady, who is a Christian Scientist, loaned me Science and Health, and because she asked me so often how I was getting on with the book, I began reading it. I also attended the Wednesday evening meetings which I found very interesting. After hearing the testimonies at the meetings, I decided to speak to some practitioner about these spots, but not until I had at least a hundred dollars on hand, because I thought I would require that amount for treatments, as I had been accustomed to paying high prices. I had not inquired about prices, and in fact did not speak to any one about my intentions, because I felt sensitive on this subject. When I had read about half of Science and Health, I missed the spots, and upon searching could find no trace of them. They had entirely disappeared without treatment. In a few weeks the reading of that book had accomplished what materia m dica had failed to accomplish in ten years. It is impossible to express the feeling of relief and happiness which came over me then.–C. K., Astoria, N. Y.
A CONVINCING INVESTIGATION
While I have testified to those around me and in many localities, of my healing in Christian Science, I feel that it is high time I put the candle in the candlestick where all who will may see. My earliest recollection was a day of suffering,–a physical inheritance from my mother, which gave simple interest for a time until years advanced and compound interest was added. My father was a physician, and material remedies were used for my mother without avail, consequently his confidence in them for me was shaken,–in fact he often told me it was better to suffer without medicine than become a chronic doser, without pain.
I began teaching in early life and continued for more than twenty years, and during that time not a day passed without pain, or fear of pain, and only for my innate love of life it would have become an intolerable burden. For five years oatmeal was my chief food and I became almost as attached to it as Kaspar Hauser to his crust. I was early taught to have faith in God, and many times was relieved of pain only to have it appear again in an aggravated form.
At last my heart cried out for the living God, and the answer came by one of His messengers, who told me of Christian Science. I replied that I believed God could heal, but that I had no faith in the healing of Christian Science, but would like to investigate its theology, as it might aid in giving me some clue to the meaning of life. For three years I had searched the works of the most scientific writers to find the origin of life; many times I would think I had traced it to the beginning, but it would elude my grasp every time. One day in talking with my friend, she said she would like to loan me the textbook, Science and Health, which I very willingly accepted. Not long afterward I felt a severe attack of suffering. I opened the book for the first time and found a paragraph near the middle which attracted my attention. I read the same paragraph over and over for nearly two hours. When the tea bell rang I closed the book and I shall never forget my perception of the new heaven and the new earth,–everything in nature that I could see seemed to have been washed and made clean. The flowers that I have always loved so much, and that from childhood had told me such sweet stories, now spoke to me of the All-in-all, the hearts of my friends seemed kinder,–I had touched the hem of the garment of healing.
I ate my supper that evening forgetful of the preparations I had made for suffering, and when the next day began I was more zealous of good work than ever before. Since closing Science and Health at my first reading I have never been able to find the paragraph which I had read so many times over, the words seemed to have slipped away from me, but my joy knew no bounds at having found the pearl of great price. By the continued reading of the book I was entirely healed, and for fourteen years I have not seen a day of physical suffering.–Miss L. M., Rome, N. Y.
DEAFNESS AND DROPSY HEALED
I had been deaf from childhood. I suffered intensely after eating, and dropsy was another of my complaints. This, with consumption, caused one doctor to say, ” It puzzles me; I have never seen such a case before as yours.”
I met a friend who had been cured in Christian Science, and she said, “Try Christian Science.” I got a copy of Science and Health and in three weeks I was entirely cured. I felt uplifted. It seemed as if God’s arms were around and about me. I felt as if heaven had come down to earth for me. After five years of suffering can any one wonder at my unspeakable gratitude?–A. B., Pittsburg, Pa.
GRATEFUL FOR MANY BLESSINGS
In 1894 I began the study of Christian Science. At that time I was greatly in need of its healing truth. For a number of years previous I had been a semi-invalid with no hope of ever being well and strong again. Several years before this time I had undergone an operation which resulted in peritonitis. For three years previous to my study of Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, I was scarcely ever free from headache caused by the weakened and diseased condition of the internal organs. At the time I began the study of Christian Science I was taking five kinds of medicine.
I began to read Science and Health, and did not take treatment, for I thought, “If this is truth, I shall be healed; if it is not, I shall be able to detect it, and will have nothing to do with it.” I became a devoted student and gradually my bodily diseases left me,–I was free, and since that time, nearly ten years ago, neither my two children nor myself have taken any medicine; and our understanding of truth has been able to meet and overcome any suggestion of illness.
I was a devoted member of an orthodox church, but as I grew older I began to question my beliefs, and to my questions I could find no satisfactory answer. I became dissatisfied and finally ceased attending church. I could not accept the idea of God taught there, and at last my friends looked sadly upon me as an atheist. There I stood until I learned to know God as revealed in Science and Health, and then all my questionings were answered. In my girlhood I had always prayed to the God I held in mind, and when the shadows of sickness pain, and death came to my family, I prayed as only those can who know that if He helps not, there is none; but my prayers were unanswered. Then I closed my Bible, saying, “There is a mistake somewhere, perhaps some time I may know.”
Only those who know the attitude of mind that I was in can understand the joy that came to me as I began to learn of God in Christian Science, and of my relation to Him.
Many proofs of the healing power of Truth and of His protecting care throng my thoughts. Seven years ago, when we were in a far distant country, where Christian Science was then unknown, my little daughter came in one morning from her school, saying, “Mother, I have measles; twenty of the girls are sick in bed and I am afraid they will put me there also.” Her face, hands, and chest were covered with a deep red rash, throat sore, and eyes inflamed. We began immediately to do our work in Science and at night, when I left her at the door of the college, her face was clear, her eyes bright, and all fear destroyed. That was the end of the disease.–F. M. P., Boston, Mass.
A JOYFUL EXPERIENCE
In love and gratitude to God, and to Mrs. Eddy, the interpreter of Jesus’ beautiful teachings, I wish to tell of some of the benefits which I have received from Christian Science. It is a little over a year since Science found me in a deplorable condition, physically as well as mentally. I had ailments of many years’ standing,–chronic stomach trouble, severe eye trouble, made almost unbearable from the constant fear of losing any sight (a fate which had befallen my mother), also a painful rupture of twenty-five years’ standing. These ailments, combined with unhappy conditions in my home, made me very despondent. I had entirely lost my belief in an all-merciful God, and I did not know where to turn for help. At that time Christian Science was brought to my notice, and I shall never forget the sublime moment when I perceived that an all-loving Father is always with me. Forgotten was all sorrow and worry, and after four weeks’ reading in Science and Health all my ailments had disappeared. I am today a healt y, contented woman.
All this has come to pass in one short year, and my earnest desire is to be more and more worthy to be called a child of God. This is in loving gratitude for an understanding of this glorious truth.–Mrs. R. J., Chicago, Ill.
AN EVER-PRESENT HELP
It is a year since I began to read Science and Health, and I will now try to outline what a knowledge of its teachings has done for me. My condition was then very trying; my eyes, which had caused me much trouble since childhood, were very painful. For these I had been treated by some of the best specialists in my native land, and after coming to the United States I had been doctored much and had worn glasses for four years. I also had catarrh, for which I had taken much medicine without being relieved. In addition to this I was an excessive smoker, using tobacco in some form almost constantly. I had contracted a smoker’s heart, and used liquors freely.
The one who brought to me that which I now prize so highly, was a book agent. I told him that I should be forced to leave my trade on account of my eyes. He then told me of having been healed of a cancer, through Christian Science treatment. He showed me a copy of Science and Health, which had the signs of much use, and after being assured that if I did my part I would be healed of all my diseases, I sent for a copy of the book.
My recovery was very rapid, for after reading the book only three weeks I was completely healed of the tobacco habit. I will say, in regard to this healing, that it did not require even as much as a resolution on my part. I was smoking a cigar, while reading Science and Health, when all the desire to continue smoking left me, and I have never had a desire to use tobacco in any form since then. My eyes were the next to manifest the influence of the new knowledge gained, and had soon so far recovered that I could go about my work with ease, and I have had no more use for glasses. To-day my heart is normal, the catarrh has totally disappeared, and I am not addicted to the use of liquor.
Christian Science has proved to be an ever-present help, not only in overcoming physical ailments, but in business and daily life. It has also overcome a great sense of fear. The Bible, which I regarded with suspicion, has become my guide, and Christianity has become a sweet reality, because the Christian Science textbook has indeed been a “Key to the Scriptures” and has breathed through the Gospel pages a sweet sense of harmony.–A. F., Sioux City, Iowa.
SEVERE EYE TROUBLE OVERCOME
After hearing Christian Science lightly spoken of, from a Christian pulpit, I decided to go to one of the services and hear for myself. From infancy I had been devoted to my church, and as soon as I was old enough I was ever active in the work. Feeling it to be my duty to attend every service held in my own church, I took advantage of the Wednesday evening meetings. My first visit was not my last, I am thankful to say, for I saw immediately that these people not only preached Christianity, but practised and lived it. At that time I was wearing glasses and had worn them for sixteen years. At times I suffered the most intense pain, and for this phase of the trouble, one specialist after another had been consulted. All gave me very much the same advice; each one urged extreme carefulness and gave me glasses that seemed to relieve for a time. None of them held out any hope that my sight would ever be restored, saying that the defect had existed since infancy, and that in time I should be blind.
The thought of blindness was very distressing to me, but I tried to bear it with Christian resignation, since I thought that God had seen fit to afflict me; but since I have learned that He is a loving Father, who gives only good, I regret that I ever charged Him with my affliction. I had no treatment, but I read Science and Health, and my eyes were healed and glasses laid aside. I can never find words to express my thanks to our dear Leader, through whose teachings my sight has been regained. I can truthfully say that “whereas I was blind, now I see”–through an understanding of Truth I have found my sight perfect as God gave it.–Miss B. S., Wilmington, N. C.
A TESTIMONY FROM IRELAND
It is with a heart full of love and gratitude to God, and to our dear Leader, that I send this testimony to the Field. I had never been a strong girl; had always been subject to colds and chills, and suffered all my life from a delicate throat. Seven years ago I had a very severe attack of rheumatic fever and subsequently two less severe ones. These left all sorts of evils behind them,–debility, chronic constipation, and several others, so that with these ills my life was often a burden to me and I used to think I never should receive relief or health. I had also lost all love for God and faith in Him. I could not accept a God who, as I then believed, visited sickness and sorrow upon His children as a means for drawing them to Him. I was in this state of mind and body when Christian Science found me. A dear friend, seeing my suffering, presented the truth to me, and though at first I did not believe that there could be healing for me, the Christian Scientists’ God seemed to be the one I had been looking for all my life. I began to read Science and Health, and shall never forget my joy at finding that I could love and trust God. I took to studying the Bible, and read nothing but Science and Health and other Christian Science literature for a year. After studying the “little book” for about six weeks, I one day realized that I was a well woman, that I had taken no medicine for three weeks, and that my body was perfectly harmonious. The reading of Science and Health had healed me. The wonderful joy and spiritual uplifting which came to me then no words of mine can describe. I had also suffered from astigmatism and had for several years been obliged to use special glasses when reading or working, and could never use my eyes for more than half an hour; but from the first reading of Science and Health I found that I could read in any light and for any length of time without the slightest discomfort. I am not only grateful for the physical healing but for the mental regeneration. I rejoice that I am now able to help others who are sick and sorrowing.–E. E. L., Curragh Camp, County Kildare, Ireland.
THE TEXTBOOK MAKES OPERATION UNNECESSARY
In the early part of the year 1895 my physician said I must undergo a surgical operation in order ever to be well. While in great fear, and dreading the operation, a kind neighbor called, and after telling me of Christian Science gave me a copy of Science and Health. She said I must put aside all medicine, and by reading faithfully she knew I could be healed. The book became my constant companion, and in a short time I was healed. Besides the relief from an operation, I was completely healed of severe headaches and stomach trouble. Physicians could give me no help for either of these ailments. For ten years I have not used medicine of any kind, and have not missed a Christian Science service on account of sickness during this period. I am perfectly well. To say that I am grateful to God for all this does not express my feelings. The physical healing was wonderful, but the understanding given me of God, and the ability to help others outweigh all else. I also love our dear Leader.–Mrs. V. I. B., Concord, N. H.
KIDNEY DISEASE AND EYE TROUBLE HEALED
Early in 1904 I was teaching in a private boarding-school. I was a very unhappy, discontented woman; I had kidney disease, besides sore eyes, and my general health was very bad. The doctor said that the climate did not suit me, and that I certainly should have a change. The best thing, he said, was to go back to France (my own country); but I did not like to leave the school, so I struggled on until July, when we went travelling for a month, but I came home worse than ever. I had a lot of worry, one disappointment after another, and I often thought that life was not worth living. In September, 1904, we heard for the first time of Christian Science through a girl who was attending our boarding-school, and who was healed through Christian Science treatment. We bought the textbook, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mrs. Eddy, and what a revelation it was and is to us; it is indeed the fountain of Truth. I had read Science and Health but a very short time when I took off my glasses, began to sleep well, and soon found myself well in mind and body. Besides this, it has brought harmony into our school, where there had been discord, and everything is changed for the better. I cannot describe the happiness that has come to me through Christian Science; I can only exclaim with the psalmist: “Bless the Lord, O my soul;” and may God bless Mrs. Eddy.
My one aim now is to live Christian Science, not in words only, but in deeds; loving God more and my neighbor as myself, and following meekly and obediently all our Leader’s teachings. Words cannot express my gratitude to Mrs. Eddy for Christian Science.–S. A. K., Vancouver, B. C.
DISEASE OF BOWELS HEALED
When I first heard of Christian Science I had been afflicted for nine years with a very painful disease of the bowels, which four physicians failed even to diagnose, all giving different causes for the dreadful sufferings I endured. The last physician advised me to take no more medicine for these attacks, as drugs would not reach the cause, or do any good. About this time I heard of Christian Science, and had the opportunity of reading “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mrs. Eddy, a few minutes every day for about a week, and I was thereby healed. In looking back I found I had not suffered in the least from the time I began reading this book. It has been nearly seventeen years since this wonderful healing, and I have had no return of the disease. My gratitude is endless and can be best expressed by striving mightily to walk in the path our Leader has so lovingly shown us in Science and Health.–Mrs. J. W. C., Scranton, Pa.
HEALED BY READING THE TEXTBOOK
After doctoring about a year, I was obliged to give up school and was under medical care for two years; but grew worse instead of better. I was then taken to specialists, who pronounced my case incurable, saying I was in the last stages of kidney disease and could live only a short time. Shortly afterward my uncle gave me a copy of “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” and asked me to study it. After studying a short time I was able to walk a distance of several miles, which I had not been able to do for three years. I also laid aside glasses which I had worn seven years, having been told I would become blind if my eyes did not receive proper care. It is over a year since I received God’s blessing, and I am now enjoying perfect health and happiness. I have never had my glasses on since I first began reading Science and Health, and I have not used any medicine.–L. R., Spring Valley, Minn.
A TESTIMONY FROM SCOTLAND
I came to Christian Science purely for physical healing. I was very ill and unhappy; very cynical and disbelieving in regard to what I heard of God and religion. I tried to live my life in my own way and put religion aside. I was a great believer in fate and in will-power, and thought to put them in the place of God, with the consequence that I was led to do many rash and foolish things. I am now thankful to say that my outlook on life is entirely changed; I have proved God’s wisdom and goodness so often that I am willing and thankful to know my future is in His hands and that all things must work out for the best. I have found a God whom I can love and worship with my whole heart, and I now read my Bible with interest and understanding.
I was healed of very bad rheumatism simply by reading Science and Health. I had tried many medicines, also massage, with no result, and the doctors told me that I would always suffer from this disease, as it was inherited, and also because I had rheumatic fever when a child. I suffered day and night, and nothing relieved me until Science proved to me the falseness of this belief by removing it. I gave up all the medicines I was taking and have never touched any since, and that is more than two years ago. Before this I had often tried to do without a medicine that I had taken every day for ten years, but was always ill and had to return to it, until I found out that one Mind is the only medicine, and then I was freed from the suffering.
I had also suffered constantly from bilious attacks, colds, and a weak chest, and had been warned not to be out in wet weather, etc., but now, I am glad to say, I am quite free from all those material laws and go out in all sorts of weather.–R. D. F., Edinburgh, Scotland.
CURING BETTER THAN ENDURING
For eight years I was a great sufferer from weak lungs and after being treated by ten different physicians, in the States of Illinois, Missouri, and Colorado, I was told there was no hope of my recovery from what they pronounced tuberculosis, which was hereditary, my father having been afflicted with it. I was greatly emaciated and hardly able to be about. My general condition was aggravated by what the doctors said was paralysis of the bowels. Three physicians so diagnosed it at different times, and assured my husband that I could never get more than temporary relief. This indeed I found difficult to obtain, in spite of my almost frantic efforts. At times I was nearly insane from suffering, and after eight years of doctoring I found myself steadily growing worse. For four years I did not have a normal action of the bowels, and it was only by extreme effort and by resort to powerful drugs or mechanical means, with resultant suffering, that any action whatever could be brought about.
I had heard nothing of the curative power of Christian Science, and only to oblige a friend I went one night, about three years ago, to one of their mid-week testimonial meetings, in Boulder, Colorado. I was much impressed by what I heard there, and determined at once to investigate this strange religion, in the hope that it might have something good for me. I bought the textbook, Science and Health, and from the first I found myself growing stronger and better, both physically and mentally, as I acquired a better understanding and endeavored to put into practice what I learned. In one week I was able to get along better without drugs than I had for years with them, and before three months had passed I was better than I had been any time in my life, for I had always suffered more or less from bowel trouble. Since that time I have taken no medicine whatever, and rely wholly upon Christian Science. My lungs are now sound, my bowels normally active, my general health excellent, and I am able to endure without fatigue tasks that before would have prostrated me. The study of our textbook was the sole means of my healing.–L. M. St. C., Matachin, Canal Zone, Panama.
SEVERE ECZEMA DESTROYED
It is only two years since I came from darkness into the light of Christian Science, and to me the spiritual uplifting has been wonderful, to say nothing of the physical healing. Words cannot express my gratitude for benefits I have received in that time. For five years I suffered with that dreaded disease, eczema, all over my body. Five doctors said there was no help for me. The suffering seemed as terrible as the hell fire that I had been taught to believe in. When Christian Science came to me two years ago through a dear friend, she gave me a copy of Science and Health and asked me to read it. I told her that I would, for I was like a drowning man grasping at a straw. I had been a Bible student for twenty-eight years, but when I commenced reading Science and Health with the Bible I was healed in less than a week. I never had a treatment. A case of measles was also destroyed in twenty-four hours after it appeared.–Mrs. M. B. G., Vermilion, Ohio.
SCIENCE AND HEALTH A PRICELESS BOON
I am a willing witness to the healing power of Christian Science, having had a lifetime’s battle with disease and medical experiments. Various doctors finally admitted that they had exhausted their resources, and could only offer me palliatives, saying that a cure was impossible. I had paralysis of the bowels, frequent sick headaches with unutterable agony, and my mortal career was nearly brought to an end by a malignant type of yellow fever. Many were the attending evils of this physical inharmony, but God confounds the wisdom of men, for while studying Science and Health two years ago, the veil of ignorance was lifted and perfect health was shown to me to be my real condition, and to such there is no relapse. The constant use of glasses, which were apparently a necessity to me for years, was proven needless, and they were laid aside. Mrs. Eddy has made Scripture reading a never-failing well of comfort to me. By her interpretation “the way of the Lord” is made straight to me and mine. It aids us in ou daily overcoming of the tyranny of the flesh and its rebellion against the blessed leading of Christ, Truth. The daily study of the Bible and our textbook is bringing more and more into our consciousness the power of God unto salvation.–J. C., Manatee, Fla.
A CRITIC CONVINCED
With gratitude to God I acknowledge my lifelong debt to Christian Science. In 1895 I attended my first Christian Science meeting, and was deeply impressed with the earnestness of the people and the love reflected, but as for the spiritual healing of the physical body, I did not believe such a thing to be possible. I bought Science and Health and studied it to be able to dispute intelligently with the supposedly deluded followers of Christian Science. I pursued the study carefully and thoroughly, and I have had abundant reason since to be glad that I did, for through this study, and the resultant understanding of my relation to God, I was healed of a disease with which I had been afflicted since childhood and for which there was no known remedy. Surely my experience has been the fulfilling in part of the Scripture: “He sent His Word and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions.” I believe that Science and Health reveals the Word referred to by David.–C. A. B. B., Kansas City, Mo.
BORN AGAIN
It was in April, 1904, that I first heard the “still, small voice” of the Christ and received healing through Christian Science; and the blessings have been so many since, that it would take too much space to name them. Reared from childhood in an intellectual atmosphere, my paternal grandfather having been an orthodox minister of the old school for forty years, and my father a deep student, ever seeking for the truth of all things, I began early to ponder and to study into the meaning of life, and came to the conclusion before I was twenty that though God probably existed in some remote place, still it was impossible to connect Him with my present living. My highest creed, therefore, became, “Do right because it is right and not for fear of being punished.” Then began the suffering. Sorrow after sorrow followed each other in rapid succession; for ten long years there was no rest, the road was indeed long and hard and had no turning, until finally the one thing that had stood by me all through the trials, namely, my health, gave way, and with that went my last hope. But the last hour of the night had come, the dawn of day was at hand; a dear friend left Science and Health upon my piano one day, saying that I would gain much good by reading it.
Glad to get away from my own poor thoughts, I opened the “little book” and began to read. I had read only a short time when such a wonderful transformation took place! I was renewed; born again. Mere words cannot tell the story of the mighty up-lifting that carried me to the very gates of heaven. When I began to read the book, life was a burden, but before I had finished reading it the first time, I was doing all my housework and doing it easily; and since that glorious day I have been a well woman. My health is splendid, and I am striving to let my light so shine that others may be led to the truth. There have been some mighty struggles with error, and I have learned that we cannot reach heaven with one long stride or easily drift inside the gate, but that the “asking” and the “seeking” and the “knocking” must be earnest and persistent.
For a long time I was always looking back to see if the error had gone, until one day when I realized that to catch a glimpse of what spiritual sense means I must put corporeal sense behind me. I then set to work in earnest to find the true way. I opened Science and Health and these words were before me, “If God were understood, instead of being merely believed, this understanding would establish health” (p. 203). I saw that I must get the right understanding of God! I closed the book and with head bowed in prayer I waited with longing intensity for some answer. How long I waited I do not know, but suddenly, like a wonderful burst of sunlight after a storm, came clearly this thought, “Be still, and know that I am God.” I held my breath–deep into my hungering thought sank the infinite meaning of that “I.” All self-conceit, egotism, selfishness, everything that constitutes the mortal “I,” sank abashed out of sight. I trod, as it were, on holy ground. Words are inadequate to convey the fullness of that spiritual uplifting, but others who have had similar xperiences will understand.
From that hour I have had an intelligent consciousness of the ever-presence of an infinite God who is only good.–C. B. G., Hudson, Mass.
A RESTLESS SENSE OF EXISTENCE DESTROYED
Through reading Science and Health and the illumination which followed, I was healed of ulceration of the stomach and kindred troubles, a restless sense of existence, agnosticism, etc. The torture I endured with the stomach trouble I will not attempt to describe. The attending physician declared that I could live but a short time, and I felt there would be a limit to my endurance of the torture, but the disease was dissipated into nothingness through Christian Science, which brought me peace.
Like many others I had been seemingly lost in the sea of error, without a compass, yet earnestly and honestly seeking a haven. I had investigated all kinds of religions and philosophies that came under my notice, with the exception of Christian Science, which was not then deemed worthy of inquiry, and yet it held the very truth I was searching for–the light which “shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” Three years of stubborn resistance to Truth, with increasing suffering, followed–then the light came, and with it a new experience. Now, after nine years of Christian Science experience, under severe tests, it can be truthfully said that it has not failed me in any hour of need.–J. F. J., Cincinnati, Ohio.
MORALLY AND PHYSICALLY HEALED
I did not accept Christian Science on account of any healing of my own, but after seeing my mother, who was fast drifting toward helplessness with rheumatism, restored to perfect health with only a few treatments in Christian Science, I thought surely this must be the truth as Jesus taught and practised it, and if so it was what I had been longing for.
This was about ten years ago and was the first I had ever heard of Christian Science. We soon got a copy of Science and Health and I began in the right way to see if Christian Science were the truth. I had no thought of studying it for bodily healing; in fact, I did not think I needed it for that, but my soul cried out for something I had not yet found. This book was indeed a key to the Scriptures.
It was not long after I began reading before I discovered that my eyes were good and strong, I could read as much as I wished, and at any time, which was something I could not do before, as my eyes had always been weak. The doctors said they never would be very strong, and that if I did not wear glasses, I might lose my sight altogether. I never gave up to wearing glasses, and now, thanks to Christian Science, I do not need them, my work for the past two years as a railway mail clerk being a good test. At the same time my eyes were healed, I also noticed that I was entirely healed of another ailment which had been with me all my life, and which was believed to be inherited. Since that time my growth has seemed to me slow, yet when I look back and view myself as I was before Christian Science found me, and compare it with my life as it now is, I can only close my eyes to the picture and rejoice that I have been “born again” and that I have daily been putting off “the old man with his deeds,” and putting on ” he new man.”
Some of the many things that have been overcome through the study of Science and Health, and through realizing and practising the truth it teaches, are profanity, the use of tobacco, a very quick temper, which made both myself and those around me at times very miserable, and such thoughts as malice, revenge, etc.–O. L. R., Fort Worth, Tex.
HEALTH AND UNDERSTANDING GAINED
Most of my boyhood days were spent in the hands of physicians. From birth I was considered a very weakly child, but my mother was brave, and being much devoted to me did everything within her knowledge and power for my comfort. Sickness and medicine were continually before me, and by the time I reached my teens I thought I knew a material remedy for every ill. I continued in my delusion, because I was never told the real cause of my trouble. Besides being under a leading specialist for two years, I was also an outdoor patient at a noted hospital, but I was not healed. It is wonderful how the “little ones” are cared for in the face of all these seeming difficulties. I always used the prayers that I had been taught, and as I grew older I began to ask for wisdom. Little by little I gained a desire for freedom, and my prayers finally led me to the truth. The first week that I heard of Christian Science, I visited the home of dear Christian Science friends, and was at once refreshed by their purity of thought nd example. I bought a copy of Science and Health, and, after studying it a little while with the Bible, I saw that if the Bible was true, Science and Health must also be true. I began to demonstrate over my physical and mental condition, and as soon as the fear and pain began to leave me I felt encouraged to go on. I was healed, and stopped complaining. I kept on studying our textbook, and when I got an understanding in a small degree of the Science of Mind, my first thought was to help others. I was guided where I could progress in Science, and was no longer “carried about with every wind of doctrine,” but held to Principle as closely as possible. From the time the healing came into my consciousness, the desire for material remedies left me, because Christian Science at once pointed out the way to get at the cause of discord and disease. All that I had to give up were the false beliefs of mortal mind. Christian Science then taught me to love the church, and to appreciate what it had already done for mankind. I often thought of the old adage, “Charity begins at home,” and after three years’ preparation I felt able to take Christian Science to my home, where it found, in due time, ready acceptance and willing disciples. This gave me even greater joy than my own healing. The more good I saw accomplished, the more love I had for the truth. Christian Science changed my course from the first, and gave me a nobler aim and purpose in life. I was not so easily influenced by other people’s shortcomings, when I learned that evil has nei her personality nor place. I was not so ready to take offence, when I found out the way to work unselfishly for the upbuilding of the Cause.–A. E. J., Toledo, Ohio.
AN EVER-PRESENT HELP FOUND
On the 23rd of March, 1900, I received from one of my daughters a copy of Science and Health on my seventy-first birthday. Although a constant reader of all kinds of papers and books, I had never heard anything of Christian Science, except a short notice that spring in a San Francisco newspaper, from an orthodox clergyman, referring to the Christian Science people in not very complimentary style.
In Mrs. Eddy’s book I came across a great deal of thought that was not readily understood at the first reading, but by continued and careful study, and a good deal of help from my knowledge of chemistry and natural philosophy, I soon shook off the belief of sensation in matter,–the so-called elementary substance. One afternoon I put the belt on my circular saw to cut blocks of firewood and also to split a small stick of frame timber. In doing this the stick closed and pinched the saw. I picked up a small wooden wedge and tried to drive it into the saw kerf, but a bit of ice let the stick on to the back of the saw and instantly it flew, with heavy force, into my face, and bouncing off my left cheek fell about twenty feet off on the snow. The blood spattered on the snow next the saw table, and on feeling with my hand there were two wounds, one on the lock of the jaw and another forward, as big as a dollar, on the cheek bone. “Now,” I thought to myself, “there is a case of surgery for you,” and without furth r ceremony, I began to treat the case to the best of my knowledge, with the result that the bleeding stopped almost instantly, and so did a thumping pain, which had commenced. I paid no more attention to the matter, but finished my work, and then went to supper. When I washed my face, I felt a big lump on the jawbone where the block of wood struck, but after my usual reading I went to bed and slept all night until near daylight, when a pain on the right side awoke me. On feeling with my hand there was another big lump on the right side, but I treated it and went to sleep again. I never lost an hour from the hurt, although I found out that my jaw was broken. There is no scar, only a little red spot on the cheek, and the lumps on the bone have long since disappeared.
In summing up the benefits I have received from the reading of Science and Health, I can but refer to a condition of sickness dating back to the war (1862), when chronic and malignant diarrhea came near making an end of my material existence. My hearing, also, was seriously impaired from the effect of cannon firing at Shiloh, but it has come back to me, and where I formerly dared not eat an orange, or grapes, I can now eat anything without being hurt. My peace of mind is giving me a rest which I never experienced before during my life, and I have ceased to look away off for the divine presence that was always near, though I did not know it.–L. B., Baldy, N. M.
MANY PHYSICAL AND MENTAL TROUBLES OVERCOME
Less than a year ago, when nothing but trouble seemed to encompass me, I was led to Christian Science. My mother’s copy of Science and Health was always lying on the table, but I scarcely ever read it. One day, however, the mental conflict was so great I commenced reading in the hope of obtaining peace. Every day since then my companions have been the Bible and Science and Health. At that time I had a very serious eruption on my face, which had been there two years. We had consulted several physicians, and used every remedy suggested to eradicate it, but they proved useless. I had given up all hopes of its ever being healed, as the physician we last consulted pronounced it tuberculosis of the skin and incurable. A few weeks after I commenced reading, I was amazed to see it almost healed over, and to-day my cheek is perfectly smooth, while the scar is disappearing.
In April my baby was born with only the practitioner and a woman friend present. I suffered little pain, and the third day I went down-stairs. I am able to nurse him,–a privilege of which I was deprived with my first child. He is a picture of health, having never been sick a day since he was born.–K. E. W. L., Mt. Dora, Fla.
A NEW LIFE GAINED
leaving home when a young man, I carried with me a protection against the temptation of a great city,–a mother’s prayers and a small Bible. For a time I read the Bible and prayed, but without understanding. This did not suffice, and evil seemed to gain the victory. I soon omitted to read my Bible; forgot to go to God in prayer for guidance and help, and looked to the world for that which it never has and never can give,–health, peace, and joy.
Thus, years later, when Christian Science came into my home, it found me prayerless, churchless, godless; a home discordant, and with no thought or knowledge of spiritual things. Up to this time, my wife had for years been seeking health through the physicians, but without success, and as a last resort had been sent to Christian Science. The help received was so wonderful that I commenced the study of Science and Health. The first effect which I realized from the reading of our textbook, was a great love for the Bible and a desire to read it, something which I had not done for years. I went in silent prayer to God, that I might see the light and truth which would enable me to be-come a better man. “Ye must be born again.” Thus again, and as a child, was I taught to pray “the effectual fervent prayer” which “availeth much.” In a few weeks’ study of Science and Health together with the Bible, and without other help, I was healed of a desire for liquor, of years’ standing, and of the use of tobacco. Ten years have passed and these appetites have never returned. I have never used either liquor or tobacco in any form from that time to the present. Surely this Scripture is fulfilled in our home: “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” How can we estimate the value of a book, the study of which brings such transformation and regeneration? Only as we endeavor to live, and strive to practise what it teaches, can we begin to pay our debt to God, and to her whom He has sent to make plain to human understanding the life and teaching of Christ Jesus.–W. H. P., B ston, Mass.
A VOICE FROM ENGLAND
For a number of years I was a weary woman, not ill enough in health to, be called an invalid, but suffering more than could be told with fatigue and weakness. Feeling that this was God’s will, I did not ask to be healed, although I was constantly doctoring. I suffered with dyspepsia, congestion of the liver, and many other things, including weak eyesight. With all the medicine, and with different changes for rest, I never regained health, and thought I never should, so I prayed for grace to bear my cross patiently for others’ sake. One day, while lying on my couch exhausted, which had become a frequent experience, the words came to me, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” I rose, knelt down and said, O God, make me well. I was telling a friend this and she kindly gave me a Sentinel. Imagine my joy when I saw the testimonies of healing! I believed them, remembering our Lord’s words, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” I obtained a copy of Science and Health and before a week had passed I realized that if God was my all I needed no glasses. My eyes were healed in a few days, and since then I have never thought of glasses. I was also cured of dyspepsia, and nothing that I have eaten has hurt me since then. The belief in health laws was next destroyed, by knowing that our heavenly Father did not make them, and from this has come the beautiful experience of the overcoming of fatigue.
For this alone I can never be thankful enough. True indeed are the words, “They shall run, and not be weary.” This was more than a year ago, and I can say that not once have I felt inclined to lie on the couch, nor have I had a headache, although I am doing more work than ever before. Fear has also been overcome in many ways.–A. L., Chelmsford, England.
DEPRAVED APPETITES OVERCOME
When Christian Science first came to me, or rather, when I first came to Christian Science, I did not have a very bad opinion of myself. I thought I was a pretty good fellow. I had no religious views. I seemed to be getting along as well as, if not better than, some who professed Christianity. So I drifted along until I was led to investigate Christian Science.
As I progressed in the understanding as gained from the study of both Science and Health and the Bible, and commenced to know myself, I found that a great change had been wrought in me. For fifteen years I had used tobacco, both chewing and smoking; for ten years I had been a victim of the drink habit, sometimes to excess; I was also addicted to profanity. Christian Science removed these appetites. A stomach trouble and other lesser ills, such as headache, a bad temper, an inordinate love of money, etc., disappeared under the same benign influence. Those things that seemed to be pleasure do not give me pleasure now. They were not real pleasure. I have lost nothing, I have sacrificed nothing; but I have gained everything, and not yet the whole, for I can see plenty yet to be done.
The condition of mind before investigating and after is as different as black and white. As Mrs. Eddy says, “Not matter, but Mind, satisfieth.–G. B. P., Henry, S. D.
CATARRH OF THE STOMACH HEALED
I should like to express my gratitude for the many benefits I have received through Christian Science, and to mention the great joy brought to me in the thought that man is not the helpless victim of sin, disease, and death. Through its teachings I have been able to overcome many errors.
When Christian Science found me, one year ago last April, in Chicago, I was suffering from catarrh of the stomach, which had been very persistent, and I had been a slave to the cigarette habit for eighteen years. Pain and weakness had robbed me of all that one holds dear. The first symptoms of the disease appeared about five years ago in the form of severe cramps of the stomach, which finally developed into other symptoms of that painful disease. I doctored continually, my diet daily becoming more rigid, until three slices of toast became my daily allowance of food.
In this condition I left the East for my home in Chicago, hoping that a change of climate might benefit me. After spending six weeks there and finding no relief, I concluded to return East. The Sunday morning before leaving I picked up a Sunday paper, and glancing through the religious items my eyes fell on the notices of Christian Science church services. Curiosity led me to a service and I shall never forget that morning or the surprise and joy it gave me to find that beautiful church, and to know that so great a number actually believed that God does heal the sick to-day. This brought a first ray of hope. The evening service found me there again. Among the notices read was that of a reading room, giving the location and time of opening. Monday morning found me there promptly, and the first book I picked up was Science and Health which opened a new world to me.
I had dieted so long and suffered so much that I had a morbid fear of food. When I had reached and read of “neither food nor the stomach, without the consent of mortal mind, can make one suffer” (Science and Health, p. 221), I left the reading room for something to eat. I found a bakery near by, and bought a bag of cakes which I ate, and shortly after I had a hearty dinner without the least complaint from my stomach.
From that time until now I have eaten anything that I wished, and the craving for cigarettes, which I had for many years, has entirely vanished. The understanding of Truth, which entirely relieved the diseased stomach, healed also the morbid appetite for smoking. After coming back East, I bought a copy of Science and Health, which I have read daily, and find it a continual help in all the affairs of life.
In my home and at work I find this Science a comfort and source of strength. I have had many difficulties in the way, but it has helped me out of them all.–W. E. B., New Britain, Conn.
SPINAL DISEASE HEALED
When I first heard of Christian Science, seven years ago, I supposed that it was some old fad under a new name. In the little Texas town where we then lived there were two or three Christian Scientists who met at the home of one of their number to read the Lesson-Sermon. Meeting one of them one day, I asked if unbelievers could come to their meetings. She said that they could if they wanted to. I went, expecting them to do something that I could laugh at when telling my friends about it. How surprised I was to find out that they didn’t do anything but read the Bible and another book which they called Science and Health. I still thought it all foolishness, but resolved to go to their meetings until I found out all they believed. I continued to go until I began to understand a little of what they knew, not what they believed; and instead of spending my time telling others what a silly thing Christian Science is, I am now trying to find words to tell what a great and wonderful thing it is. I have been healed of so-called incurable spinal disease of ten years’ standing by studying the Bible and Science and Health. Science and Health has been my only teacher, and I wish to send my thanks to our dear Leader.
There are no other Scientists near where we now live, but I have the Quarterly and study the lessons by myself. I have five small children, and Christian Science is invaluable to me in controlling them, and in overcoming their common ills. They often help themselves and each other to destroy their little hurts and fears.–Mrs. M. H., Oleta, Okla.
MANY TROUBLES OVERCOME
In the second chapter of First Peter, ninth verse, I read “that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” The periodicals so wisely established by our Leader give us one means of showing forth the praises of Truth.
From the darkness of physical pain and weariness into the light of wholeness and joyousness in work and living,–from the darkness of a clouded sight into the light of clearer vision,–from the darkness of doubt and discord into the marvellous light of the reality of good,–this is what a reading of the Christian Science textbook has done for me.
At the time the book was lent to me, I was teaching in the public schools of Chicago, and absences from my work on account of illness were of frequent occurrence. For five weeks I had been under the care of a specialist for an organic trouble, and he said I would have to come as many more months before a cure could be effected. At this time, Science and Health was brought to my notice. I never thought of such a thing as being healed by the reading of the book, but my thought was so changed that I was healed, not only of the organic trouble, but of blurred eyesight, fatigue, and a train of other discordant manifestations. I did not go back to the physician until four months later to pay my bill (which, by the way, was more than five times the price of the Science and Health I had purchased). From the time I read the book I taught steadily without losing time from my work. I was helped, too, with my work in many other ways.
Through reading the textbook I learned that God has given us strength to do all we have to do, and that it is the things we do not have to do (the envying, strife, emulating, vainglorying, and so on) that leave in their wake fatigue and discord.
Gratitude to our beloved Leader, Mrs. Eddy, and to her faithful students, with whom I afterwards became associated, can be expressed only by daily efforts to put into practice what has been taught.– T. H. A., Madison, Wis.
PREJUDICE OVERCOME
I became interested in Christian Science somewhat over three years ago when in much need of help. I had never been strong, and as I grew older I grew weaker and at last became so ill that life was a burden to me. Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy was sent to me, in answer to prayer, as I thought. I was a little afraid of all these new fads, as I thought them, but I had not read far before I felt that I had found the truth which makes us free. I was healed of stomach trouble, inward weakness, and bilious attacks.
One physician said I might have to undergo an operation before I could get well, but, thanks to this Truth, I have found that the only operation needed was the regeneration of this so-called human mind by learning to know God. In many cases I have been able to help myself and others.
Words cannot express my thanks to Mrs. Eddy, and to all who are bringing these great truths to the help of the whole world.–E. E. M., Huntington, W. Va.
A CONVINCING TESTIMONY
I became interested in Christian Science some five years ago, the practical nature of its statements appealing to me, and I must say, at the outset, that with my little experience I have found it all and more than I ever dreamt of realizing on this plane of existence. I am satisfied that I have found Truth. God is indeed to me an ever-present help.
My little girl, some ten months old, was afflicted with constipation. It was so severe I dreaded to go out anywhere with her, as I knew not when she would be taken with a convulsion. I had tried all the usual remedies in such cases, but it seemed to grow more obstinate. There was a Christian Scientist living in the same house with us, a Scientist who let her light shine, and while she said little, I felt the reflection of Love. I had no knowledge of the teachings of Christian Science, save that God was the physician at all times. In my own way I believed He was all-powerful, and I said to my husband one day, “I am through with medicine for baby. I am just going to leave her in God’s care and see what He will do. I have done all I can.” I did as I said, laid my burden at God’s feet, and did not pick it up again. In two days the child was perfectly natural, and has since been free from the trouble. She is now six years of age. Some months later a second test came. She woke up at nine o’clock at night crying and holding her ear. There was to sense a gathering. I was alone. I took up my Science and Health and Bible, but the more I worked the louder she screamed. Error kept suggesting material remedies, but I said firmly: “No; I shall not go back to error. God will help me.” Just then I thought of my own fear, how excessive it was, and a conversation I had with the Scientist who first voiced the truth to me, came to mind. She said she always found it helpful to treat herself and cast out her own fear before treating a patient. I put baby down and again took up my Science and Health, and these were the words I read:
“Every trial of our faith in God makes us stronger. The more difficult seems the material condition to be overcome by Spirit, the stronger should be our faith and the purer our love. The Apostle John says: ‘There is no fear in Love, but perfect Love casteth out fear'” (Science and Health, p. 410). I looked up, the crying had ceased, the child was smiling, and in a few minutes asked to be put to bed. There has been no further trouble of that kind.
I have since seen the power of Truth overcome error of many forms, including croup, whooping-cough, tonsilitis, etc. I am thankful for all these proofs, but far more grateful am I for the spiritual teaching to love, to forgive, to curb my tongue, and cease my criticism.–M. A. H., Brockton, Mass.
HEALED PHYSICALLY AND SPIRITUALLY
I had been taking medicine continually for many years. Finally I was taken suddenly ill and could not leave my room for about two months, then I went away for three months, thinking that I should come back and be able to continue my work. I improved very much, but the fear of quick consumption was with my doctor and my family and friends, and I was warned about the coming winter. Only too soon the fear manifested itself. I had worked just three weeks when all the pains and aches returned, and I had to go to bed as soon as I got home, so there was no pleasure in living. My employer advised me to see my physician, and said perhaps I should not work that winter. I then and there turned to Christian Science. I could not afford to give up work and live away from home, neither did I want to depend on doctors and medicine any longer. I took the book and read it on my way to work, and at noon I lay down on a couch instead of going out for luncheon and fell asleep. When I awoke I was a different person, all pains an aches had gone, and I was free. I was so happy I could hardly contain myself; to material sense it was wonderful. As I walked I kept saying, “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,” and tried to understand “the scientific statement of being” by repeating portions at a time, then pondering over them. I read the book four times in succession, and every time I found more and more to aid in the understanding.
This healing was in October, 1901, with no other help than Science and Health, and soon I was relieved of other chronic ailments. In February I was able to put away eyeglasses, which I had worn ten years and a half for astigmatism. Oculists told me I would always have to wear them. A month later my father asked me to help him, as he was suffering so much from constipation, dyspepsia, and neuralgia. He had been subsisting on bran, nearly starving himself until be was most miserable, and his limbs seemed so cold that they were kept wrapped in blankets. I felt very humble as he asked me, and told him I would have a practitioner help him, as I had never treated any one; but he would not consent to have any one but myself, and I finally told him I would try, but that he must not hold Science responsible if he were not benefited, for my lack of understanding, and not Science, would be at fault. At my request he read Science and Health, ate whatever he wanted, and used no medicine in any form. After two treatmen s I received word from him that he was healed of that bondage of thirty years’ standing. In view of all these signs which followed my acceptance of Christian Science, I knew it must be true.–R. L. A., Chicago, Ill.
A VOICE FROM THE SOUTH
I was delicate from childhood, and my parents did not think it was possible for me to live more than a few years. I lived, however, although there was not much improvement in my health. Travel and change of climate brought only temporary relief, and the physicians gave me no hope that I would ever be well.
As a last resort I began the study of Science and Health, and before I had finished reading the book I realized that its author was divinely commissioned to bring this spiritual message to a waiting world. Through this reading my health was restored, and I was healed of one disease that has been called incurable by all physicians.
For this, together with the greater and higher blessing of having the spiritual fact of being unfolded to me, I am most grateful.
What shall be rendered for such benefits received and made possible by the consecrated life of our revered Leader? Only by following the teachings of our textbook, and by loving obedience to her gentle and timely admonitions can we show our true sense of gratitude.–F. H. D., De Funiak Springs, Fla.
HEALED AFTER MUCH SUFFERING
A testimony given in the Journal led me to investigate Christian Science, and I hope in return to be the means of leading some one else to see the beauty of this saving truth, and to learn to know God aright and man’s relationship to Him. I know from experience that it is prejudice and misapprehension of what Christian Science is, that keeps many from enjoying the blessings it bestows.
I had been taking patent medicines for several years, and had been to one of the best sanitariums in this country, but was not healed, although I received some benefit, for which I shall always feel grateful, for I know the physicians did all they could for me. I sometimes thought I had exhausted all remedies, but did not give up, for I felt there must be something to heal me if I could find it.
When in this state of mind Christian Science came to my notice, and after reading several Journals, I purchased a copy of Science and Health. I read for several days at odd times. I commenced to improve, and in about a week I was healed of most of my ills, among which were dyspepsia and nervous debility.
Although I had heard about Christian Science before, I had never heard that the reading of the Christian Science textbook had ever effected the healing of anybody. I commenced reading to find out what Christian Science was, but was surprised to find myself improving, and was soon assured that it was the theology of Science and Health that healed me, just as it was the theology of Jesus that healed the sick.
It has also proved to me that there can be no Christian Science Church that does not heal the sick and sinful, for healing follows as the natural result of the teaching of Christian Science. The Bible has become a new revelation to me, and I can read it much more understandingly by the light received through the reading of Science and Health.–A. F. M., Fairmont, Minn.
THROUGH GREAT TRIBULATIONS
When I attempt to make plain what Christian Science has done for me, words fail me. For twenty years I was a constant sufferer, my spine having been injured when I was very young. As a little child I suffered so much that I would look up to the stars and beg God, who I thought might be up there somewhere, to take me away from the earth,–I was so tired. A great wall of pain seemed to separate me from the pleasures enjoyed by others, and I could not explain how I felt, because no one could understand. Years passed, and I saw my earthly happiness swept away; my heart was broken and I did not know what to do. I cried for help, day after day and night after night, although I was not sure what God was, nor where He was. I only knew that I suffered, and was in need of help, and that there was no earthly help for either mind or body. I loved purity, truth, and right always, and this made evil seem a most terrible reality. I was unable to cope with it, and so found myself in despair. This was my condition when I ommenced reading Science and Health. I was ready for its message, and in about ten days there came a wonderful insight into the truth which heals the sick and binds up the broken-hearted. All pain left me, I had a glimpse of the new heavens and the new earth, and was beginning to be fed by Love divine.
I had suffered for years with insomnia. That night I rested like a child, and awoke the next morning well and happy. A flood of light daily illumined the pages of the “little book,” and the revelation it holds for all came to my waiting heart. ” The peace which passeth all understanding ” rested upon me, and joy too deep for words transformed my life. My prayers were answered, for I had found God in Christian Science.
The Bible, which I knew very little about, became my constant study, my joy, and my guide. The copy which I bought at the time of my healing is marked from Genesis to Revelation. It was so constantly in my hands for three years that the cover became worn and the leaves loose, so it has been laid away for a new one. Two and three o’clock in the morning often found me poring over its pages, which grew more and more sacred to me every day, and the help I received therefrom was wonderful, for which I can find no words to express iny gratitude.–I. L., Los Angeles, Cal.
A HELPFUL TESTIMONY
Words cannot express my gratitude to God for Christian Science. When I first read Science and Health, I had tried every remedy I had ever heard of. I felt no change in mind or body that I was conscious of until I read page 16 of the chapter on ” Prayer,” in Science and Health. The first words of the “spiritual sense of the Lord’s Prayer,” telling of our Father-Mother God, gave me a glimpse of heavenly light. I stopped and reasoned, and remembered the teachings of Jesus. The truth of man’s spiritual being dawned on my consciousness. I realized I was not subject to mortal laws, as I had been taught all my life. I could not explain how I knew this, but I knew it. Through Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy had given me what I had longed for all my life,–a Mother, a perfect “Father-Mother God.” I had known there was a great lack, and at that time I believe the orthodox world had but half of the truth which Jesus came to establish. When I read, “Give us this day our daily bread,” and its spiritual interpretation, my tears began to flow; all the years of bitterness, hate, and fear melted away. I knew then, as I know now, that nothing satisfies but Love. That day began the outward and inward conscious healing,–mental and physical. There never came a doubt! I absolutely knew that Christian Science was and is the truth. Money, friends, materiality, are nothing beside the conscious knowledge of God, man, and the universe.
I did not need treatment from any one,–Science and Health was so clear and beautiful. I could not understand the Bible before, but I found it illumined now that I had a little understanding of Christian Science. For ten years I have not had to lie down in the daytime from any sickness. I am now, and have been all these years, the picture of perfect health. When I first read Science and Health I weighed one hundred and four pounds; I now weigh over one hundred and sixty. This physical health is not to be compared to my happiness,–my harmony that nothing can take away,–because it is the gift of God. Nothing has shown me the perversity of the human mind more than in its conclusions in regard to my healing. Even when I felt and knew that I was healed, people constantly said, because I was thin and delicate looking, ” You are not well, any one could look at you and know it.” Now that I am fleshy, they say, “You don’t look as if you ever had a pain in all your life. You could not have had consumption.”
When I think what my life was before I had Christian Science, of the six years of colds, suffering, and coughing, not to mention the unhappiness, I want to “work, watch, and pray ” for the Mind of Christ, that I may work rightly in God’s vineyard, and to know that in truth, what belongs to one belongs to all,–that one God, one Life, Truth, and Love is all.–A. C. L., Kansas City, Kans.
DESIRE FOR LIQUOR AND TOBACCO DISAPPEARED
I first heard of Christian Science four years ago. At that time drinking and smoking were my comforters. I had no other companionship. I had lived almost constantly from childhood in an evil atmosphere. Though I was far from being satisfied with my condition, I failed to see how to better it until I read Science and Health. I used occasionally to listen to a sermon, but sermons did not give me any more comfort than I derived from my pipe, hence I concluded that church-going could not satisfy me and I preferred drinking and smoking. When I began to read Science and Health, I saw it offered something substantial. After a few months’ study all desire for drinking and smoking disappeared. I did not give them up; I made no sacrifices, I simply found something better. I might mention that I had smoked ever since I can remember. I used to smoke years before I left school, and, like most Englishmen, loved my pipe, and would almost prefer to miss a meal rather than to go without my smoke. I used to think it gave me comfort.
During my four years’ study of Christian Science I have not spent a cent for doctors or medicine, neither have I lost a day from my work on account of sickness, which compares wonderfully with the previous four years. I take a great interest and pleasure in reading the Bible and studying the lessons in the Quarterly. The Bible used to be a most mysterious book to me, but Science and Health makes it a most precious book, making its meaning clearer, plainer, and simpler.
I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Mrs. Eddy and to the friend who invited me to attend the service held in the Auditorium years ago. I also wish to acknowledge the benefit I have had from the Journal and the Sentinel. They have helped me wonderfully. If the value of Science and Health and these publications were measured as business men value things, by the results or benefits they bring, they certainly would be priceless to me. It would be impossible to measure their value, as I have got something from Science and Health that all the money in the world could not buy.–H. P. H., Chicago, Ill.
AN EXPRESSION OF LOVING GRATITUDE
In the spring of 1893, while studying for the ministry, Science and Health was placed in my hands, and the truth contained therein at once became to me the pearl of great price. I literally devoured the book, reading it about eighteen hours a day. Its originality was startling, upsetting my preconceived opinions of God, man, and creation. Two sentences especially appealed to me: “The foundation of mortal discord is a false sense of man’s origin” (p. 262), and, “For right reasoning, there should be but one fact before the thought, namely, spiritual existence ” (p. 492). I had found the keynote to the Science of being as taught in this marvellous book, and persevered until a glimpse of the new heavens and new earth came, for the old were passing away. With this spiritual uplifting came also physical health.
All my life had been spent in semi-invalidism, and I seemed destined to a life of suffering. In three weeks after beginning Science and Health, to my joyful surprise I found myself a well man, sound physically, and uplifted spiritually. Life was being lived from a new basis, the old things of personal sense were passing away and all things becoming new. I learned that the infinite good is the one Friend upon whom we can call at all times, an all-powerful, ever-present help in every time of trouble; that His children are really governed in peace and harmony by spiritual law, and as the right understanding of it is gained, the other things soon follow, bringing a peace the human concept can never know.
For the last twelve years my whole time has been devoted to Christian Science practice, and I have seen nearly every so-called incurable disease healed by its beneficent influence. God bless our dear Leader! She has set before us an open door, which no man can shut, and it is but a question of time when the world will know her better and love her more.–E. E. N., Washington, D. C.
HEALED OF BRIGHT’S DISEASE
August 18, 1902, I was taken down with what three doctors pronounced Bright’s disease, and they stated that I would not live a year, or if I did succeed in living longer, I would be mentally unbalanced. On December 6, 1902, my wife presented me with Science and Health as a birthday gift, and it was indeed the best present I ever received. Since that time I have been reading it and attending the Second Church here. I have not used any medicine since, nor has any one in our home. I am in the finest of health and have lost all my bad habits. This truth has brought a great spiritual uplifting to all of us, and words cannot express my gratitude to Mrs. Eddy and to all who have helped me to the same.–T. V., Chicago, Ill.
FIBROID TUMOR DESTROYED
When quite young I was impressed that the Bible was not properly interpreted by the preachers, for I could not conceive of a God of wrath who was unjust enough to allow His little ones to suffer pain, misery, and death. I had hope, however, that some day the truth would be revealed to an awakening world, but little did I dream that even then there was one of God’s noble women who reflected sufficient purity and holiness to entertain the “angel of his presence,” and commune with the true God.
I was believed to be predisposed to scrofula, so that I was not a strong or attractive child, and my girlhood and womanhood were scarcely ever free from dread of the laws of matter and lack of strength. The climax was reached when a physician informed me, after weeks of treatment, that I had a fibroid tumor, which required an operation. The conditions were most trying and I was heartsick and discouraged when, in January, 1893, I heard of Christian Science through a letter from a dear sister who had been greatly benefited thereby, and I resolved to go at once to a practitioner, for I believed it to be the long-lost truth that would make me free. It meant a great effort and sacrifice for me to go to Chicago at that time, but divine Love opened the way and I reached there in March. I had been in my sister’s home but a few days, reading Science and Health almost constantly, when I asked her if I had not better have treatment for the tumor, which had given me so much trouble. She said to me, “You feel well, do you not?” I assured her that I never had felt so well as I had since reaching there. “Well,” she said with decision, “your tumor is gone, for God never made it,” and her statements were true, for it has never been heard of from that day. Since then I have been healed of chronic sore throat, hay fever, and other troubles, and I know that Christian Science is the truth.–B. W. S., Coldwater, Mich.
LIGHT OUT OF DARKNESS
I have received so much benefit from the testimonies in the Sentinel and Journal that I send mine, hoping it may cheer some struggling heart. I was reared by kind and loving Christian parents and was a member of an orthodox church for over twenty years, but I was never satisfied. I was filled with fear and bound down by the false gods of this world,–sin, disease, and poverty; consequently every way I turned, and in everything I attempted to do, I was met with disappointment and failure; but God was leading me into a different life.
My interest was first awakened to Christian Science about thirteen years ago, and I have been a willing disciple ever since. Through the reading of Science and Health I was healed of chronic catarrh and laryngitis, and it also enabled me to lay off my glasses. Christian Science has not only helped me mentally, morally, and physically, but the greatest blessing of all is the spiritual uplifting which enabled me to know that God is both able and willing to care for His children, if we are but willing to do our part and bear the cross which, though it seems heavy at times, always brings a sure reward. Christian Science has not only helped me, but it has enabled me to help others.
The Bible is a new book to me. I now see what Jesus meant when he said, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
My heart goes out in gratitude to Mrs. Eddy for the work she has done and is still doing for the world, and to God I am most grateful that He has guided me into the truth, that I may have life, and have it more abundantly.–Mrs. M. M., Chicago, Ill.
A PRICELESS BOON
I have long desired to express my gratitude for what Christian Science has done, through reading Science and Health, for me and my family. I was healed of profanity, the tobacco habit, and a bad temper, through the understanding that man is the image and likeness of God. I was also healed of kidney disease and rheumatism. What surprised me most, however, was this; I had had one finger thrown out of place some fifteen years before. It was crooked, but it became straight and useful. A bone in my foot had also been broken, leaving a bunch, which disappeared after I studied Christian Science and received class instruction. I am an entirely well man and for this I am very grateful. I am also glad that I have learned enough of Truth and Love to be able to heal others. I wish to express my thankful appreciation of our Leader, also of the Sentinel and the Journal.–N. R. F., Salina, Kans.
HEALED OF CONSUMPTION AND ASTHMA
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the great benefits which have come to me through Christian Science. It is nearly ten years since I began the investigation of the subject by borrowing a copy of Science and Health. I had become a hopeless sufferer from asthma,–the disease being so aggravated at times as to make breathing almost impossible. I was also a victim of that dread disease, consumption. It was hereditary, nearly all my family on both sides having passed away with it. I took up Christian Science very much as a drowning man catches at a straw. However, I was much interested as soon as I began to understand it, and having read the book nearly all my waking hours for a few weeks, I became so much better and so convinced of its truth, that myself and wife destroyed all the medicines in the home, and have never since used any remedy except Christian Science. I continued to study and to put into practice the teaching as best I knew, and was restored to health in a few months.
Prior to my investigation of Christian Science I had been from boyhood an outspoken infidel, had read that class of literature extensively, and had no desire for anything of a religious nature,–the orthodox teaching never having appealed to me as a rational exposition of an all-wise God. I now have no more doubt of the truth of the teaching of the great Way-shower, Jesus of Nazareth, than I doubt the correctness of the basic law of mathematics or music. I have no doubt whatever that Christian Science saved me from the grave, and thus proved a most practicable and efficient help in time of greatest need. However great my physical suffering has been, I can but feel glad that through it the door of consciousness was opened to let in the light of Truth. Thus I have progressed a little way in the knowledge of God, good, as revealed in Christian Science.–C. B., Webb City, Mo.
A GRATEFUL TESTIMONY
“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. ”
This has been proven to me in every way. When Christian Science came to me, I was a wreck, physically, mentally, and financially; but since the reading of Science and Health turned my thought toward the light, I have found that, as far as I am willing to receive the word and live it, all comforts are supplied me. I am especially grateful for the spiritual help. I know that things which I did and thought last year I would not do or think this year, and am satisfied. Through the careful and prayerful study of Science and Health I have been lifted from sickness to health, from sorrow to peace, from lack to plenty, and, the most beautiful of all, from darkness to light.–Mrs. H. S. C., Seattle, Wash.
The End