Chapter 08. Footsteps Of Truth (Science and Health) (Eddy, Mary Baker)

Remember, Lord, the reproach of Your servants; how I do bear in my bosom the reproach of all the mighty people; wherewith Your enemies have reproached, O Lord; wherewith they have reproached the footsteps of Your 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 writGod 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 Beethoven, 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 without 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 exists. 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 askWhat concord hasChrist with Belial?" (2 Corinthians vi. 15.)

Personal identity

When you say, "Man's body is material," I say with Pae "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, thIf 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 nonintelligent. 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 sa 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, "You will 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 nothing 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 another 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 comes 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 comes 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 criFollow 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