Chapter 03. Marriage (Science and Health) (Eddy, Mary Baker)

What therefore God hasjoined 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 addSuffer it to be so nor thus it becomes 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, "You will not commit adultery," is no less imperative than the one, "You will 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 lovTwo 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 cares . . . 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 hasnot 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 without 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 saPure 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 comes of which Jesus said, 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.

You are right, immortal Shakespeare, great poet of humani 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 hasgiven, 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 helmsmDo 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 seesing 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 understad 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 pareDo 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 marriaut they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage."

And when they shall say to you, Seek to them that have familiar spirits, And to wizards that peep and that mutter; Should not a people seek to their God? ISAIAH.

Verily, verily, I say to you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death. Then said the Jews to him, Now we know that you have 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 ahat 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 me-diumship

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 socalled 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 LazarOur 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 sa "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 hasno power."

A dream vanishing

The period required for this dream of material life, embracing its so-called pleasures and pains, to vanish from consciousness, "knows 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 comes." 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 saMy 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 saYou 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 folloThere 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 seems 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 saCome, see a man, which told me all things that ever I ds 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 sa "O ye hypocrites! ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?"

Hypocrisy 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 sa "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 you." 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