Chapter 10. Science Of Being (Science and Health) (Eddy, Mary Baker)

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life, . . . That which we have seen and heard declare we to you, that ye also may have fellowship with and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. JOHN, First Epistle.

Here I stand. I can do no otherwise; so help me God! Amen! MARTIN LUTHER.

Materialistic challenge

In the material world, thought has brought to light with great rapidity many useful wonders. With like activity have thought's swift pinions been rising towards the realm of the real, to the spiritual cause of those lower things which give impulse to inquiry. Belief in a material basis, from which may be deduced all rationality, is slowly yielding to the idea of a metaphysical basis, looking away from matter to Mind as the cause of every effect. Materialistic hypotheses challenge metaphysics to meet in final combat. In this revolutionary period, like the shepherd-boy with his sling, woman goes forth to battle with Goliath.

Confusion confounded

In this final struggle for supremacy, semi-metaphysical systems afford no substantial aid to scientific metaphysics, for their arguments are based on the false testimony of the material senses as well as on the facts of Mind. These semi-metaphysical systems are one and all pantheistic, and savor of Pandemonium, a house divided against itself.

From first to last the supposed coexistence of Mind and matter and the mingling of good and evil have resulted from the philosophy of the serpent. Jesus' demonstrations sift the chaff from the wheat, and unfold the unity and the reality of good, the unreality, the nothingness, of evil.

Divine metaphysics

Human philosophy has made God manlike. Christian Science makes man Godlike. The first is error; the latter is truth. Metaphysics is above physics, and matter does not enter into metaphysical premises or conclusions. The categories of metaphysics rest on one basis, the divine Mind. Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul.

These ideas are perfectly real and tangible to spiritual consciousness, and they have this, advantage over the objects and thoughts of material sense, they are good and eternal.

Biblical foundations

The testimony of the material senses is neither absolute nor divine. I therefore plant myself unreservedly on the teachings of Jesus, of his apostles, of the prophets, and on the testimony of the Science of Mind. Other foundations there are none. All other systems systems based wholly or partly on knowledge gained through the material senses are reeds shaken by the wind, not houses built on the rock.

Rejected theories

The theories I combat are the1) that all is matter; (2) that matter originates in Mind, and is as real as Mind, possessing intelligence and life. The first theory, that matter is everything, is quite as reasonable as the second, that Mind and matter coexist and cooperate. One only of the following statements can be tr1) that everything is matter; (2) that everything is Mind. Which one is it?

Matter and Mind are opposites. One is contrary to the other in its very nature and essence; hence both cannot be real. If one is real, the other must be unreal. Only by understanding that there is but one power, not two powers, matter and Mind, are scientific and logical conclusions reached. Few deny the hypothesis that intelligence, apart from man and matter, governs the universe; and it is generally admitted that this intelligence is the eternal Mind or divine principle, Love.

Prophetic ignorance

The prophets of old looked for something higher than the systems of their times; hence their foresight of the new dispensation of Truth. But they knew not what would be the precise nature of the teaching and demonstration of God, divine Mind, in His more infinite meanings, the demonstration which was to destroy sin, sickness, and death, establish the definition of omnipotence, and maintain the Science of Spirit.

The pride of priesthood is the prince of this world. It has nothing in Christ. Meekness and charity have divine authority. Mortals think wickedly; consequently they are wicked. They think sickly thoughts, and so become sick. If sin makes sinners, Truth and Love alone can unmake them. If a sense of disease produces suffering and a sense of ease antidotes suffering, disease is mental, not material. Hence the fact that the human mind alone suffers, is sick, and that the divine Mind alone heals.

The life of Christ Jesus was not miraculous, but it was indigenous to his spirituality, the good soil wherein the seed of Truth springs up and bears much fruit. Christ's Christianity is the chain of scientific being reappearing in all ages, maintaining its obvious correspondence with the Scriptures and uniting all periods in the design of God. Neither emasculation, illusion, nor insubordination exists in divine Science.

Jesus instructed his disciples whereby to heal the sick through Mind instead of matter. He knew that the philosophy, Science, and proof of Christianity were in Truth, casting out all inharmony.

Studious disciples

In Latin the word rendered /disciple/ signifies student; and the word indicates that the power of healing was not a supernatural gift to those learners, but the result of their cultivated spiritual understanding of the divine Science, which their Master demonstrated by healing the sick and sinning. Hence the universal application of his sayiNeither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me [understand me] through their word."

New Testament basis

Our Master said, "But the Comforter . . . shall teach you all things." When the Science of Christianity appears, it will lead you into all truth. The Sermon on the Mount is the essence of this Science, and the eternal life, not the death of Jesus, is its outcome.

Modern evangel

Those, who are willing to leave their nets or to cast them on the right side for Truth, have the opportunity now, as aforetime, to learn and to practise Christian healing. The Scriptures contain it. The spiritual import of the Word imparts this power. But, as Paul says, "How shall they hear without a preacher? and how shall they preach, except they be sent?" If sent, how shall they preach, convert, and heal multitudes, except the people hear?

Spirituality of Scripture

The spiritual sense of truth must be gained before Truth can be understood. This sense is assimilated only as we are honest, unselfish, loving, and meek. In the soil of an "honest and good heart" the seed must be sown; else it beareth not much fruit, for the swinish element in human nature uproots it. Jesus sa2 "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures." The spiritual sense of the Scriptures brings out the scientific sense, and is the new tongue referred to in the last chapter of Mark's Gospel.

Jesus' parable of "the sower" shows the care our Master took not to impart to dull ears and gross hearts the spiritual teachings which dulness and grossness could not accept. Reading the thoughts of the people, he sa "Give not that which is holy to the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine."

Unspiritual contrasts

It is the spiritualization of thought and Christianization of daily life, in contrast with the results of the ghastly farce of material existence; it is chastity and purity, in contrast with the downward tendencies and earthward gravitation of sensualism and impurity, which really attest the divine origin and operation of Christian Science. The triumphs of Christian Science are recorded in the destruction of error and evil, from which are propagated the dismal beliefs of sin, sickness, and death.

God the Principle of all

The divine Principle of the universe must interpret the universe. God is the divine Principle of all that represents Him and of all that really exists. Christian Science, as demonstrated by Jesus, alone reveals the natural, divine Principle of Science.

Matter and its claims of sin, sickness, and death are contrary to God, and cannot emanate from Him. There is no /material/ truth. The physical senses can take no cognizance of God and spiritual Truth. Human belief has sought out many inventions, but not one of them can solve the problem of being without the divine Principle of divine Science. Deductions from material hypotheses are not scientific. They differ from real Science because they are not based on the divine law.

Science versus sense

Divine Science reverses the false testimony of the material senses, and thus tears away the foundations of error. Hence the enmity between Science and the senses, and the impossibility of attaining perfect understanding till the errors of sense are eliminated.

The so-called laws of matter and of medical science have never made mortals whole, harmonious, and immortal. Man is harmonious when governed by Soul. Hence the importance of understanding the truth of being, which reveals the laws of spiritual existence.

Spiritual law the only law

God never ordained a material law to annul the spiritual law. If there were such a material law, it would oppose the supremacy of Spirit, God, and impugn the wisdom of the creator. Jesus walked on the waves, fed the multitude, healed the sick, and raised the dead in direct opposition to material laws. His acts were the demonstration of Science, overcoming the false claims of material sense or law.

Material knowledge illusory

Science shows that material, conflicting mortal opinions and beliefs emit the effects of error at all times, but this atmosphere of mortal mind cannot be destructive to morals and health when it is opposed promptly and persistently by Christian Science. Truth and Love antidote this mental miasma, and thus invigorate and sustain existence. Unnecessary knowledge gained from the five senses is only temporal, the conception of mortal mind, the offspring of sense, not of Soul, Spirit, and symbolizes all that is evil and perishable. /Natural science/, as it is commonly called, is not really natural nor scientific, because it is deduced from the evidence of the material senses. Ideas, on the contrary, are born of Spirit, and are not mere inferences drawn from material premises.

Five senses deceptive

The senses of Spirit abide in Love, and they demonstrate Truth and Life. Hence Christianity and the Science which expounds it are based on spiritual understanding, and they supersede the socalled laws of matter. Jesus demonstrated this great verity. When what we erroneously term the five physical senses are misdirected, they are simply the manifested beliefs of mortal mind, which affirm that life, substance, and intelligence are material, instead of spiritual. These false beliefs and their products constitute the flesh, and the flesh wars against Spirit.

Impossible partnership

Divine Science is absolute, and permits no half-way position in learning its Principle and rule establishing it by demonstration. The conventional firm, called matter and mind, God never formed. Science and understanding, governed by the unerring and eternal Mind, destroy the imaginary copartnership, matter and mind, formed only to be destroyed in a manner and at a period as yet unknown. This suppositional partnership is already obsolete, for matter, examined in the light of divine metaphysics, disappears.

Spirit the starting-point

Matter has no life to lose, and Spirit never dies. A partnership of mind with matter would ignore omnipresent and omnipotent Mind. This shows that matter did not originate in God, Spirit, and is not eternal. Therefore matter is neither substantial, living, nor intelligent. The starting-point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind, that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle.

Divine synonyms

To grasp the reality and order of being in its Science, you must begin by reckoning God as the divine Principle of all that really is. Spirit, Life, Truth, Love, combine as one, and are the Scriptural names for God. All substance, intelligence, wisdom, being, immortality, cause, and effect belong to God. These are His attributes, the eternal manifestations of the infinite divine Principle, Love. No wisdom is wise but His wisdom; no truth is true, no love is lovely, no life is Life but the divine; no good is, but the good God bestows.

The divine completeness

Divine metaphysics, as revealed to spiritual understanding, shows clearly that all is Mind, and that Mind is God, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, that is, all power, all presence, all Science. Hence all is in reality the manifestation of Mind.

Our material human theories are destitute of Science. The true understanding of God is spiritual. It robs the grave of victory. It destroys the false evidence that misleads thought and points to other gods, or other so-called powers, such as matter, disease, sin, and death, superior or contrary to the one Spirit.

Truth, spiritually discerned, is scientifically understood. It casts out error and heals the sick.

Universal brotherhood

Having one God, one Mind, unfolds the power that heals the sick, and fulfils these sayings of Scripture, "I am the Lord that healeth you," and "I have found a ransom." When the divine precepts are understood, they unfold the foundation of fellowship, in which one mind is not at war with another, but all have one Spirit, God, one intelligent source, in accordance with the Scriptural commaLet this Mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus." Man and his Maker are correlated in divine Science, and real consciousness is cognizant only of the things of God.

The realization that all inharmony is unreal brings objects and thoughts into human view in their true light, and presents them as beautiful and immortal. Harmony in man is as real and immortal as in music. Discord is unreal and mortal.

Perfection requisite

If God is admitted to be the only Mind and Life, there ceases to be any opportunity for sin and death. When we learn in Science how to be perfect even as our Father in heaven is perfect, thought is turned into new and healthy channels, towards the contemplation of things immortal and away from materiality to the Principle of the universe, including harmonious man.

Material beliefs and spiritual understanding never mingle. The latter destroys the former. Discord is the /nothingness/ named error. Harmony is the /somethingness/ named Truth.

Like evolving like

Nature and revelation inform us that like produces like. Divine Science does not gather grapes from thorns nor figs from thistles. Intelligence never produces non-intelligence; but matter is ever non-intelligent and therefore cannot spring from intelligence. To all that is unlike unerring and eternal Mind, this Mind says, "You will surely die;" and elsewhere the Scripture says that dust returns to dust. The non-intelligent relapses into its own unreality. Matter never produces mind. The immortal never produces the mortal. Good cannot result in evil. As God Himself is good and is Spirit, goodness and spirituality must be immortal. Their opposites, evil and matter, are mortal error, and error has no creator. If goodness and spirituality are real, evil and materiality are unreal and cannot be the outcome of an infinite God, good.

Natural history presents vegetables and animals as preserving their original species, like reproducing like. A mineral is not produced by a vegetable nor the man by the brute. In reproduction, the order of genus and species is preserved throughout the entire round of nature. This points to the spiritual truth and Science of being. Error relies upon a reversal of this order, asserts that Spirit produces matter and matter produces all the ills of flesh, and therefore that good is the origin of evil. These suppositions contradict even the order of material so-called science.

Material error

The realm of the real is Spirit. The unlikeness of Spirit is matter, and the opposite of the real is not divine, it is a human concept. Matter is an error of statement. This error in the premise leads to errors in the conclusion in every statement into which it enters. Nothing we can say or believe regarding matter is immortal, for matter is temporal and is therefore a mortal phenomenon, a human concept, sometimes beautiful, always erroneous.

Substance /versus/ supposition

Is Spirit the source or creator of matter? Science reveals nothing in Spirit out of which to create matter. Divine metaphysics explains away matter. Spirit is the only substance and consciousness recognized by divine Science. The material senses oppose this, but there are no material senses, for matter has no mind. In Spirit there is no matter, even as in Truth there is no error, and in good no evil. It is a false supposition, the notion that there is real substancematter, the opposite of Spirit. Spirit, God, is infinite, all. Spirit can have no opposite.

One cause supreme

That matter is substantial or has life and sensation, is one of the false beliefs of mortals, and exists only in a supposititious mortal consciousness. Hence, as we approach Spirit and Truth, we lose the consciousness of matter. The admission that there can be material substance requires another admission, namely, that Spirit is not infinite and that matter is selfcreative, self-existent, and eternal. From this it would follow that there are two eternal causes, warring forever with each other; and yet we say that Spirit is supreme and all-presence.

The belief of the eternity of matter contradicts the demonstration of life as Spirit, and leads to the conclusion that if man is material, he originated in matter and must return to dust, logic which would prove his annihilation.

Substance is Spirit

All that we term sin, sickness, and death is a mortal belief. We define matter as error, because it is the opposite of life, substance, and intelligence. Matter, with its mortality, cannot be substantial if Spirit is substantial and eternal. Which ought to be substance to us, the erring, changing, and dying, the mutable and mortal, or the unerring, immutable, and immortal? A New Testament writer plainly describes faith, a quality of mind, as "the /substance/ of things hoped for."

Material mortality

The doom of matter establishes the conclusion that matter, slime, or protoplasm never originated in the immortal Mind, and is therefore not eternal. Matter is neither created by Mind nor for the manifestation and support of Mind.

Spiritual tangibility

Ideas are tangible and real to immortal consciousness, and they have the advantage of being eternal. Spirit and matter can neither coexist nor cooperate, and one can no more create the other than Truth can create error, or /vice versa/.

In proportion as the belief disappears that life and intelligence are in or of matter, the immortal facts of being are seen, and their only idea or intelligence is in God. Spirit is reached only through the understanding and demonstration of eternal Life and Truth and Love.

Pantheistic tendencies

Every system of human philosophy, doctrine, and medicine is more or less infected with the pantheistic belief that there is mind in matter; but this belief contradicts alike revelation and right reasoning. A logical and scientific conclusion is reached only through the knowledge that there are not two bases of being, matter and mind, but one alone, Mind.

Pantheism, starting from a material sense of God, seeks cause in effect, Principle in its idea, and life and intelligence in matter.

The things of God are beautiful

In the infinitude of Mind, matter must be unknown. Symbols and elements of discord and decay are not products of the infinite, perfect, and eternal /All/. From Love and from the light and harmony which are the abode of Spirit, only reflections of good can come. All things beautiful and harmless are ideas of Mind. Mind creates and multiplies them, and the product must be mental.

Finite belief can never do justice to Truth in any direction. Finite belief limits all things, and would compress Mind, which is infinite, beneath a skull bone. Such belief can neither apprehend nor worship the infinite; and to accommodate its finite sense of the divisibility of Soul and substance, it seeks to divide the one Spirit into persons and souls.

Belief in many gods

Through this error, human belief comes to have "gods many and lords many." Moses declared as Jehovah's first command of the TThou shalt have no other gods before me!" But behold the zeal of belief to establish the opposite error of many minds. The argument of the serpent in the allegory, "Ye shall be as gods," urges through every avenue the belief that Soul is in body, and that infinite Spirit, and Life, is in finite forms.

Sensationless body

Rightly understood, instead of possessing a sentient material form, man has a sensationless body; and God, the Soul of man and of all existence, being perpetual in His own individuality, harmony, and immortality, imparts and perpetuates these qualities in man, through Mind, not matter. The only excuse for entertaining human opinions and rejecting the Science of being is our mortal ignorance of Spirit, ignorance which yields only to the understanding of divine Science, the understanding by which we enter into the kingdom of Truth on earth and learn that Spirit is infinite and supreme. Spirit and matter no more commingle than light and darkness. When one appears, the other disappears.

God and His image

Error presupposes man to be both mind and matter. Divine Science contradicts the corporeal senses, rebukes mortal belief, and ashat is the Ego, whence its origin and what its destiny? The Ego-man is the reflection of the Ego-God; the Ego-man is the image and likeness of perfect Mind, Spirit, divine Principle.

The one Ego, the one Mind or Spirit called God, is infinite individuality, which supplies all form and comeliness and which reflects reality and divinity in individual spiritual man and things.

The mind supposed to exist in matter or beneath a skull bone is a myth, a misconceived sense and false conception as to man and Mind. When we put off the false sense for the true, and see that sin and mortality have neither Principle nor permanency, we shall learn that sin and mortality are without actual origin or rightful existence. They are native nothingness, out of which error would simulate creation through a man formed from dust.

The true new idea

Divine Science does not put new wine into old bottles, Soul into matter, nor the infinite into the finite. Our false views of matter perish as we grasp the facts of Spirit. The old belief must be cast out or the new idea will be spilled, and the inspiration, which is to change our standpoint, will be lost. Now, as of old, Truth casts out evils and heals the sick.

Figures of being

The real Life, or Mind, and its opposite, the so-called material life and mind, are figured by two geometrical symbols, a circle or sphere and a straight line. The circle represents the infinite without beginning or end; the straight line represents the finite, which has both beginning and end. The sphere represents good, the self-existent and eternal individuality or Mind; the straight line represents evil, a belief in a self-made and temporary material existence. Eternal Mind and temporary material existence never unite in figure or in fact.

Opposite symbols

A straight line finds no abiding-place in a curve, and a curve finds no adjustment to a straight line. Similarly, matter has no place in Spirit, and Spirit has no place in matter. Truth has no home in error, and error has no foothold in Truth. Mind cannot pass into non-intelligence and matter, nor can non-intelligence become Soul. At no point can these opposites mingle or unite. Even though they seem to touch, one is still a curve and the other a straight line.

There is no inherent power in matter; for all that is material is a material, human, mortal thought, always governing itself erroneously.

Truth is the intelligence of immortal Mind. Error is the so-called intelligence of mortal mind.

Truth is not inverted

Whatever indicates the fall of man or the opposite of God or God's absence, is the Adam-dream, which is neither Mind nor man, for it is not begotten of the Father. The rule of inversion infers from error its opposite, Truth; but Truth is the light which dispels error. As mortals begin to understand Spirit, they give up the belief that there is any true existence apart from God.

Source of all life and action

Mind is the source of all movement, and there is no inertia to retard or check its perpetual and harmonious action. Mind is the same Life, Love, and wisdom "yesterday, and to-day, and forever." Matter and its effects sin, sickness, and death are states of mortal mind which act, react, and then come to a stop. They are not facts of Mind. They are not ideas, but illusions. Principle is absolute. It admits of no error, but rests upon understanding.

But what say prevalent theories? They insist that Life, or God, is one and the same with material life socalled. They speak of both Truth and error as /mind/, and of good and evil as /spirit/. They claim that to be life which is but the objective state of material sense, such as the structural life of the tree and of material man, and deem this the manifestation of the one Life, God.

Spiritual structure

This false belief as to what really constitutes life so detracts from God's character and nature, that the true sense of His power is lost to all who cling to this falsity. The divine Principle, or Life, cannot be practically demonstrated in length of days, as it was by the patriarchs, unless its Science be accurately stated. We must receive the divine Principle in the understanding, and live it in daily life; and unless we so do, we can no more demonstrate Science, than we can teach and illustrate geometry by calling a curve a straight line or a straight line a sphere.

Are mentality, immortality, consciousness, resident in matter? It is not rational to say that Mind is infinite, but dwells in finiteness, in matter, or that matter is infinite and the medium of Mind.

Mind never limited

If God were limited to man or matter, or if the infinite could be circumscribed within the finite, God would be corporeal, and unlimited Mind would seem to spring from a limited body; but this is an impossibility. Infinite Mind can have no starting-point, and can return to no limit. It can never be in bonds, nor be fully manifested through corporeality.

Material recognition impossible

Is God's image or likeness matter, or a mortal, sin, sickness, and death? Can matter recognize Mind? Can infinite Mind recognize matter? Can the infinite dwell in the finite or know aught unlike the infinite? Can Deity be known through the material senses? Can the material senses, which receive no direct evidence of Spirit, give correct testimony as to spiritual life, truth, and love?

The answer to all these questions must forever be in the negative.

Our physical insensibility to Spirit

The physical senses can obtain no proof of God. They can neither see Spirit through the eye nor hear it through the ear, nor can they feel, taste, or smell Spirit. Even the more subtile and misnamed material elements are beyond the cognizance of these senses, and are known only by the effects commonly attributed to them.

According to Christian Science, the only real senses of man are spiritual, emanating from divine Mind. Thought passes from God to man, but neither sensation nor report goes from material body to Mind. The intercommunication is always from God to His idea, man. Matter is not sentient and cannot be cognizant of good or of evil, of pleasure or of pain. Man's individuality is not material. This Science of being obtains not alone hereafter in what men call Paradise, but here and now; it is the great fact of being for time and eternity.

The human counterfeit

What, then, is the material personality which suffers, sins, and dies? It is not man, the image and likeness of God, but man's counterfeit, the inverted likeness, the /unlikeness/ called sin, sickness, and death. The unreality of the claim that a mortal is the true image of God is illustrated by the opposite natures of Spirit and matter, Mind and body, for one is intelligence while the other is non-intelligence.

Material misconceptions

Is God a physical personality? Spirit is not physical. The belief that a material body is man is a false conception of man. The time has come for a finite conception of the infinite and of a material body as the seat of Mind to give place to a diviner sense of intelligence and its manifestations, to the better understanding that Science gives of the Supreme Being, or divine Principle, and idea.

Salvation is through reform

By interpreting God as a corporeal Saviour but not as the saving Principle, or divine Love, we shall continue to seek salvation through pardon and not through reform, and resort to matter instead of Spirit for the cure of the sick. As mortals reach, through knowledge of Christian Science, a higher sense, they will seek to learn, not from matter, but from the divine Principle, God, how to demonstrate the Christ, Truth, as the healing and saving power.

It is essential to understand, instead of believe, what relates most nearly to the happiness of being. To seek Truth through belief in a human doctrine is not to understand the infinite. We must not seek the immutable and immortal through the finite, mutable, and mortal, and so depend upon belief instead of demonstration, for this is fatal to a knowledge of Science. The understanding of Truth gives full faith in Truth, and spiritual understanding is better than all burnt offerings.

The Master said, "No man comes to the Father [the divine Principle of being] but by me," Christ, Life, Truth, Love; for Christ says, "I am the way." Physical causation was put aside from first to last by this original man, Jesus. He knew that the divine. Principle, Love, creates and governs all that is real.

Goodness a portion of God

In the Saxon and twenty other tongues /good/ is the term for God. The Scriptures declare all that He made to be good, like Himself, good in Principle and in idea. Therefore the spiritual universe is good, and reflects God as He is.

Spiritual thoughts

God's thoughts are perfect and eternal, are substance and Life. Material and temporal thoughts are human, involving error, and since God, Spirit, is the only cause, they lack a divine cause. The temporal and material are not then creations of Spirit. They are but counterfeits of the spiritual and eternal. Transitory thoughts are the antipodes of everlasting Truth, though (by the supposition of opposite qualities) error must also say, "I am true." But by this saying error, the lie, destroys itself.

Sin, sickness, and death are comprised in human material belief, and belong not to the divine Mind. They are without a real origin or existence. They have neither Principle nor permanence, but belong, with all that is material and temporal, to the nothingness of error, which simulates the creations of Truth. All creations of Spirit are eternal; but creations of matter must return to dust. Error supposes man to be both mental and material. Divine Science contradicts this postulate and maintains man's spiritual identity.

Divine allness

We call the absence of Truth, /error/. Truth and error are unlike. In Science, Truth is divine, and the /infinite/ God can have no unlikeness. Did God, Truth, create error? No! "Does a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?" God being everywhere and all-inclusive, how can He be absent or suggest the absence of omnipresence and omnipotence? How can there be more than /all/?

Neither understanding nor truth accompanies error, nor is error the offshoot of Mind. Evil calls itself something, when it is nothing. It says, "I am man, but I am not the image and likeness of God;" whereas the Scriptures declare that man was made in God's likeness.

Error unveiled

Error is false, mortal belief; it is illusion, without spiritual identity or foundation, and it has no real existence. The supposition that life, substance, and intelligence are /in/ matter, or /of/ it, is an error. Matter is neither a thing nor a person, but merely the objective supposition of Spirit's opposite. The five material senses testify to truth and error as united in a mind both good and evil. Their false evidence will finally yield to Truth, to the recognition of Spirit and of the spiritual creation.

Truth cannot be contaminated by error. The statement that /Truth is real/ necessarily includes the correlated statement, that /error, Truth's unlikeness, is unreal/.

The great conflict

The suppositional warfare between truth and error is only the mental conflict between the evidence of the spiritual senses and the testimony of the material senses, and this warfare between the Spirit and flesh will settle all questions through faith in and the understanding of divine Love. Superstition and understanding can never combine. When the final physical and moral effects of Christian Science are fully apprehended, the conflict between truth and error, understanding and belief, Science and material sense, foreshadowed by the prophets and inaugurated by Jesus, will cease, and spiritual harmony reign. The lightnings and thunderbolts of error may burst and flash till the cloud is cleared and the tumult dies away in the distance. Then the raindrops of divinity refresh the earth. As St. Paul saThere remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God" (of Spirit).

The chief stones in the temple

The chief stones in the temple of Christian Science are to be found in the following postulathat Life is God, good, and not evil; that Soul is sinless, not to be found in the body; that Spirit is not, and cannot be, materialized; that Life is not subject to death; that the spiritual real man has no birth, no material life, and no death.

The Christ-element

Science reveals the glorious possibilities of immortal man, forever unlimited by the mortal senses. The Christ-element in the Messiah made him the Way-shower, Truth and Life.

The eternal Truth destroys what mortals seem to have learned from error, and man's real existence as a child of God comes to light. Truth demonstrated is eternal life. Mortal man can never rise from the temporal /debris/ of error, belief in sin, sickness, and death, until he learns that God is the only Life. The belief that life and sensation are in the body should be overcome by the understanding of what constitutes man as the image of God. Then Spirit will have overcome the flesh.

Wickedness is not man

A wicked mortal is not the idea of God. He is little else than the expression of error. To suppose that sin, lust, hatred, envy, hypocrisy, revenge, have life abiding in them, is a terrible mistake. Life and life's idea, Truth and Truth's idea, never make men sick, sinful, or mortal.

Death but an illusion

The fact that the Christ, or Truth, overcame and still overcomes death proves the "king of terrors" to be but a mortal belief, or error, which Truth destroys with the spiritual evidences of Life; and this shows that what appears to the senses to be death is but a mortal illusion, for to the real man and the real universe there is no death-process.

The belief that matter has life results, by the universal law of mortal mind, in a belief in death. So man, tree, and flower are supposed to die; but the fact remains, that God's universe is spiritual and immortal.

Spiritual offspring

The spiritual fact and the material belief of things are contradictions; but the spiritual is true, and therefore the material must be untrue. Life is not in matter. Therefore it cannot be said to pass out of matter. Matter and death are mortal illusions. Spirit and all things spiritual are the real and eternal.

Man is not the offspring of flesh, but of Spirit, of Life, not of matter. Because Life is God, Life must be eternal, self-existent. Life is the everlasting I AM, the Being who was and is and shall be, whom nothing can erase.

Death no advantage

If the Principle, rule, and demonstration of man's being are not in the least understood before what is termed death overtakes mortals, they will rise no higher spiritually in the scale of existence on account of that single experience, but will remain as material as before the transition, still seeking happiness through a material, instead of through a spiritual sense of life, and from selfish and inferior motives. That Life or Mind is finite and physical or is manifested through brain and nerves, is false. Hence Truth comes to destroy this error and its effects, sickness, sin, and death. To the spiritual class, relates the ScriptuOn such the second death hasno power."

Future purification

If the change called /death/ destroyed the belief in sin, sickness, and death, happiness would be won at the moment of dissolution, and be forever permanent; but this is not so. Perfection is gained only by perfection. They who are unrighteous shall be unrighteous still, until in divine Science Christ, Truth, removes all ignorance and sin.

Sin is punished

The sin and error which possess us at the instant of death do not cease at that moment, but endure until the death of these errors. To be wholly spiritual, man must be sinless, and he becomes thus only when he reaches perfection. The murderer, though slain in the act, does not thereby forsake sin. He is no more spiritual for believing that his body died and learning that his cruel mind died not. His thoughts are no purer until evil is disarmed by good. His body is as material as his mind, and /vice versa/.

The suppositions that sin is pardoned while unforsaken, that happiness can be genuine in the midst of sin, that the so-called death of the body frees from sin, and that God's pardon is aught but the destruction of sin, these are grave mistakes. We know that all will be changed "in the twinkling of an eye," when the last trump shall sound; but this last call of wisdom cannot come till mortals have already yielded to each lesser call in the growth of Christian character. Mortals need not fancy that belief in the experience of death will awaken them to glorified being.

Salvation and probation

Universal salvation rests on progression and probation, and is unattainable without them. Heaven is not a locality, but a divine state of Mind in which all the manifestations of Mind are harmonious and immortal, because sin is not there and man is found having no righteousness of his own, but in possession of "the mind of the Lord," as the Scripture says.

"In the place where the tree falls, there it shall be." So we read in Ecclesiastes. This text has been transformed into the popular proverb, "As the tree falls, so it must lie." As man falleth asleep, so shall he awake. As death findeth mortal man, so shall he be after death, until probation and growth shall effect the needed change. Mind never becomes dust. No resurrection from the grave awaits Mind or Life, for the grave has no power over either.

Day of judgment

No final judgment awaits mortals, for the judgmentday of wisdom comes hourly and continually, even the judgment by which mortal man is divested of all material error. As for spiritual error there is none.

When the last mortal fault is destroyed, then the final trump will sound which will end the battle of Truth with error and mortality; "but of that day and hour, knows no man." Here prophecy pauses. Divine Science alone can compass the heights and depths of being and reveal the infinite.

Primitive error

Truth will be to us "the resurrection and the life" only as it destroys all error and the belief that Mind, the only immortality of man, can be fettered by the body, and Life be controlled by death. A sinful, sick, and dying mortal is not the likeness of God, the perfect and eternal.

Matter is the primitive belief of mortal mind, because this so-called mind has no cognizance of Spirit. To mortal mind, matter is substantial, and evil is real. The so-called senses of mortals are material. Hence the so-called life of mortals is dependent on matter.

Explaining the origin of material man and mortal mind, Jesus saWhy do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father, the devil [evil], and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his oor he is a liar, and the father of it."

Immortal man

This carnal material mentality, misnamed /mind/, is mortal. Therefore man would be annihilated, were it not for the spiritual real man's indissoluble connection with his God, which Jesus brought to light. In his resurrection and ascension, Jesus showed that a mortal man is not the real essence of manhood, and that this unreal material mortality disappears in presence of the reality.

Elementary electricity

Electricity is not a vital fluid, but the least material form of illusive consciousness, the material mindlessness, which forms no link between matter and Mind, and which destroys itself. Matter and mortal mind are but different strata of human belief. The grosser substratum is named matter or body; the more ethereal is called mind. This so-called mind and body is the illusion called a mortal, a mind in matter. In reality and in Science, both strata, mortal mind and mortal body, are false representatives of man.

The material so-called gases and forces are counterfeits of the spiritual forces of divine Mind, whose potency is Truth, whose attraction is Love, whose adhesion and cohesion are Life, perpetuating the eternal facts of being. Electricity is the sharp surplus of materiality which counterfeits the true essence of spirituality or truth, the great difference being that electricity is not intelligent, while spiritual truth is Mind.

The counterfeit forces

There is no vapid fury of mortal mind expressed in earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity and this so-called mind is self-destroyed. The manifestations of evil, which counterfeit divine justice, are called in the Scriptures, "The anger of the Lord." In reality, they show the self-destruction of error or matter and point to matter's opposite, the strength and permanency of Spirit. Christian Science brings to light Truth and its supremacy, universal harmony, the entireness of God, good, and the nothingness of evil.

Instruments of error

The five physical senses are the avenues and instruments of human error, and they correspond with error. These senses indicate the common human belief, that life, substance, and intelligence are a unison of matter with Spirit. This is pantheism, and carries within itself the seeds of all error.

If man is both mind and matter, the loss of one finger would take away some quality and quantity of the man, for matter and man would be one.

Mortal verdict

The belief that matter thinks, sees, or feels is not more real than the belief that matter enjoys and suffers. This mortal belief, misnamed /man/, is error, sayi2 "Matter has intelligence and sensation. Nerves feel. Brain thinks and sins. The stomach can make a man cross. Injury can cripple and matter can kill man." This verdict of the so-called material senses victimizes mortals, taught, as they are by physiology and pathology, to revere false testimony, even the errors that are destroyed by Truth through spiritual sense and Science.

Mythical pleasure

The lines of demarcation between immortal man, representing Spirit, and mortal man, representing the error that life and intelligence are in matter, show the pleasures and pains of matter to be myths, and human belief in them to be the father of mythology, in which matter is represented as divided into intelligent gods. Man's genuine selfhood is recognizable only in what is good and true. Man is neither self-made nor made by mortals. God created man.

Severed members

The inebriate believes that there is pleasure in intoxication. The thief believes that he gains something by stealing, and the hypocrite that he is hiding himself. The Science of Mind corrects such mistakes, for Truth demonstrates the falsity of error.

Severed members

The belief that a severed limb is aching in the old location, the sensation seeming to be in nerves which are no longer there, is an added proof of the unreliability of physical testimony.

Mortals unlike immortals

God creates and governs the universe, including man. The universe is filled with spiritual ideas, which He evolves, and they are obedient to the Mind that makes them. Mortal mind would transform the spiritual into the material, and then recover man's original self in order to escape from the mortality of this error. Mortals are not like immortals, created in God's own image; but infinite Spirit being all, mortal consciousness will at last yield to the scientific fact and disappear, and the real sense of being, perfect and forever intact, will appear.

Goodness transparent

The manifestation of God through mortals is as light passing through the window-pane. The light and the glass never mingle, but as matter, the glass is less opaque than the walls. The mortal mind through which Truth appears most vividly is that one which has lost much materiality much error in order to become a better transparency for Truth. Then, like a cloud melting into thin vapor, it no longer hides the sun.

Brainology a myth

All that is called mortal thought is made up of error. The theoretical mind is matter, named /brain/, or /mate//rial consciousness/, the exact opposite of real Mind, or Spirit. Brainology teaches that mortals are created to suffer and die. It further teaches that when man is dead, his immortal soul is resurrected from death and mortality. Thus error theorizes that spirit is born of matter and returns to matter, and that man has a resurrection from dust; whereas Science unfolds the eternal verity, that man is the spiritual, eternal reflection of God.

Scientific purgation

Progress is born of experience. It is the ripening of mortal man, through which the mortal is dropped for the immortal. Either here or hereafter, suffering or Science must destroy all illusions regarding life and mind, and regenerate material sense and self. The old man with his deeds must be put off. Nothing sensual or sinful is immortal. The death of a false material sense and of sin, not the death of organic matter, is what reveals man and Life, harmonious, real, and eternal.

The so-called pleasures and pains of matter perish, and they must go out under the blaze of Truth, spiritual sense, and the actuality of being. Mortal belief must lose all satisfaction in error and sin in order to part with them.

Whether mortals will learn this sooner or later, and how long they will suffer the pangs of destruction, depends upon the tenacity of error.

Mixed testimony

The knowledge obtained from the corporeal senses leads to sin and death. When the evidence of Spirit and matter, Truth and error, seems to commingle, it rests upon foundations which time is wearing away. Mortal mind judges by the testimony of the material senses, until Science obliterates this false testimony. An improved belief is one step out of error, and aids in taking the next step and in understanding the situation in Christian Science.

Belief an autocrat

Mortal belief is a liar from the beginning, not deserving power. It says to mortals, "You are wretched!" and they think they are so; and nothing can change this state, until the belief changes. Mortal belief says, "You are happy!" and mortals are so; and no circumstance can alter the situation, until the belief on this subject changes. Human belief says to mortals, "You are sick!" and this testimony manifests itself on the body as sickness. It is as necessary for a health-illusion, as for an illusion of sickness, to be instructed out of itself into the understanding of what constitutes health; for a change in either a health-belief or a belief in sickness affects the physical condition.

Self-improvement

Erroneous belief is destroyed by truth. Change the evidence, and that disappears which before seemed real to this false belief, and the human consciousness rises higher. Thus the reality of being is attained and man found to be immortal. The only fact concerning any material concept is, that it is neither scientific nor eternal, but subject to change and dissolution.