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Title: Unity of Good

Author: Mary Baker Eddy

Release date: August 25, 2005 [eBook #16591]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Justin Gillbank, Josephine Paolucci and the
        Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNITY OF GOOD ***




Produced by Justin Gillbank, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net






UNITY OF GOOD

BY

MARY BAKER EDDY

AUTHOR OF SCIENCE AND HEALTH WITH KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES

Registered U.S. Patent Office

Published by The Trustees under the Will of Mary Baker G. Eddy

BOSTON, U.S.A.

Authorized Literature of
THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST
in Boston, Massachusetts

_Copyright, 1887, 1891, 1908_
BY MARY BAKER G. EDDY
_Copyright renewed, 1915_
_Copyright renewed, 1919_

_All rights reserved_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




Contents


Caution in the Truth
  _Does God know or behold sin, sickness, and death?_

Seedtime and Harvest
  _Is anything real of which the physical senses are cognizant?_

The Deep Things of God

Ways Higher than Our Ways

Rectifications

A Colloquy

The Ego

Soul

There is no Matter
  _Sight_
  _Touch_
  _Taste_
  _Force_

Is There no Death?

Personal Statements

Credo
  _Do you believe in God?_
  _Do you believe in man?_
  _Do you believe in matter?_
  _What say you of woman?_
  _What say you of evil?_

Suffering from Others' Thoughts

The Saviour's Mission

Summary




Unity of Good

Caution in the Truth


Perhaps no doctrine of Christian Science rouses so much natural doubt and
questioning as this, that God knows no such thing as sin. Indeed, this may
be set down as one of the "things hard to be understood," such as the
apostle Peter declared were taught by his fellow-apostle Paul, "which they
that are unlearned and unstable wrest ... unto their own destruction." (2
Peter iii. 16.)

Let us then reason together on this important subject, whose statement in
Christian Science may justly be characterized as _wonderful_.


_Does God know or behold sin, sickness, and death?_

The nature and character of God is so little apprehended and demonstrated
by mortals, that I counsel my students to defer this infinite inquiry, in
their discussions of Christian Science. In fact, they had better leave the
subject untouched, until they draw nearer to the divine character, and are
practically able to testify, by their lives, that as they come closer to
the true understanding of God they lose all sense of error.

The Scriptures declare that God is too pure to behold iniquity (Habakkuk
i. 13); but they also declare that God pitieth them who fear Him; that
there is no place where His voice is not heard; that He is "a very present
help in trouble."

The sinner has no refuge from sin, except in God, who is his salvation. We
must, however, realize God's presence, power, and love, in order to be
saved from sin. This realization takes away man's fondness for sin and his
pleasure in it; and, lastly, it removes the pain which accrues to him from
it. Then follows this, as the _finale_ in Science: The sinner loses his
sense of sin, and gains a higher sense of God, in whom there is no sin.

The true man, really _saved_, is ready to testify of God in the infinite
penetration of Truth, and can affirm that the Mind which is good, or God,
has no knowledge of sin.

In the same manner the sick lose their sense of sickness, and gain that
spiritual sense of harmony which contains neither discord nor disease.

According to this same rule, in divine Science, the dying--if they die in
the Lord--awake from a sense of death to a sense of Life in Christ, with a
knowledge of Truth and Love beyond what they possessed before; because
their lives have grown so far toward the stature of manhood in Christ
Jesus, that they are ready for a spiritual transfiguration, through their
affections and understanding.

Those who reach this transition, called _death_, without having rightly
improved the lessons of this primary school of mortal existence,--and still
believe in matter's reality, pleasure, and pain,--are not ready to
understand immortality. Hence they awake only to another sphere of
experience, and must pass through another probationary state before it can
be truly said of them: "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord."

They upon whom the second death, of which we read in the Apocalypse
(Revelation xx. 6), hath no power, are those who have obeyed God's
commands, and have washed their robes white through the sufferings of the
flesh and the triumphs of Spirit. Thus they have reached the goal in divine
Science, by knowing Him in whom they have believed. This knowledge is not
the forbidden fruit of sin, sickness, and death, but it is the fruit which
grows on the "tree of life." This is the understanding of God, whereby man
is found in the image and likeness of good, not of evil; of health, not of
sickness; of Life, not of death.

God is All-in-all. Hence He is in Himself only, in His own nature and
character, and is perfect being, or consciousness. He is all the Life and
Mind there is or can be. Within Himself is every embodiment of Life and
Mind.

If He is All, He can have no consciousness of anything unlike Himself;
because, if He is omnipresent, there can be nothing outside of Himself.

Now this self-same God is our helper. He pities us. He has mercy upon us,
and guides every event of our careers. He is near to them who adore Him.
To understand Him, without a single taint of our mortal, finite sense of
sin, sickness, or death, is to approach Him and become like Him.

Truth is God, and in God's law. This law declares that Truth is All, and
there is no error. This law of Truth destroys every phase of error. To gain
a temporary consciousness of God's law is to feel, in a certain finite
human sense, that God comes to us and pities us; but the attainment of the
understanding of His presence, through the Science of God, destroys our
sense of imperfection, or of His absence, through a diviner sense that God
is all true consciousness; and this convinces us that, as we get still
nearer Him, we must forever lose our own consciousness of error.

But how could we lose all consciousness of error, if God be conscious of
it? God has not forbidden man to know Him; on the contrary, the Father bids
man have the same Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus,"--which was
certainly the divine Mind; but God does forbid man's acquaintance with
evil. Why? Because evil is no part of the divine knowledge.

John's Gospel declares (xvii. 3) that "life eternal" consists in the
knowledge of the only true God, and of Jesus Christ, whom He has sent.
Surely from such an understanding of Science, such knowing, the vision of
sin is wholly excluded.

Nevertheless, at the present crude hour, no wise men or women will rudely
or prematurely agitate a theme involving the All of infinity.

Rather will they rejoice in the small understanding they have already
gained of the wholeness of Deity, and work gradually and gently up toward
the perfect thought divine. This meekness will increase their apprehension
of God, because their mental struggles and pride of opinion will
proportionately diminish.

Every one should be encouraged not to accept any personal opinion on so
great a matter, but to seek the divine Science of this question of Truth by
following upward individual convictions, undisturbed by the frightened
sense of any need of attempting to solve every Life-problem in a day.

"Great is the mystery of godliness," says Paul; and _mystery_ involves the
unknown. No stubborn purpose to force conclusions on this subject will
unfold in us a higher sense of Deity; neither will it promote the Cause of
Truth or enlighten the individual thought.

Let us respect the rights of conscience and the liberty of the sons of God,
so letting our "moderation be known to all men." Let no enmity, no
untempered controversy, spring up between Christian Science students and
Christians who wholly or partially differ from them as to the nature of sin
and the marvellous unity of man with God shadowed forth in scientific
thought. Rather let the stately goings of this wonderful part of Truth be
left to the supernal guidance.

"These are but parts of Thy ways," says Job; and the whole is greater than
its parts. Our present understanding is but "the seed within itself," for
it is divine Science, "bearing fruit after its kind."

Sooner or later the whole human race will learn that, in proportion as the
spotless selfhood of God is understood, human nature will be renovated, and
man will receive a higher selfhood, derived from God, and the redemption of
mortals from sin, sickness, and death be established on everlasting
foundations.

The Science of physical harmony, as now presented to the people in divine
light, is radical enough to promote as forcible collisions of thought as
the age has strength to bear. Until the heavenly law of health, according
to Christian Science, is firmly grounded, even the thinkers are not
prepared to answer intelligently leading questions about God and sin, and
the world is far from ready to assimilate such a grand and all-absorbing
verity concerning the divine nature and character as is embraced in the
theory of God's blindness to error and ignorance of sin. No wise mother,
though a graduate of Wellesley College, will talk to her babe about the
problems of Euclid.

Not much more than a half-century ago the assertion of universal salvation
provoked discussion and horror, similar to what our declarations about sin
and Deity must arouse, if hastily pushed to the front while the platoons of
Christian Science are not yet thoroughly drilled in the plainer manual of
their spiritual armament. "Wait patiently on the Lord;" and in less than
another fifty years His name will be magnified in the apprehension of this
new subject, as already He is glorified in the wide extension of belief in
the impartial grace of God,--shown by the changes at Andover Seminary and
in multitudes of other religious folds.

Nevertheless, though I thus speak, and from my heart of hearts, it is due
both to Christian Science and myself to make also the following statement:
When I have most clearly seen and most sensibly felt that the infinite
recognizes no disease, this has not separated me from God, but has so bound
me to Him as to enable me instantaneously to heal a cancer which had eaten
its way to the jugular vein.

In the same spiritual condition I have been able to replace dislocated
joints and raise the dying to instantaneous health. People are now living
who can bear witness to these cures. Herein is my evidence, from on high,
that the views here promulgated on this subject are correct.

Certain self-proved propositions pour into my waiting thought in connection
with these experiences; and here is one such conviction: that an
acknowledgment of the perfection of the infinite Unseen confers a power
nothing else can. An incontestable point in divine Science is, that because
God is All, a realization of this fact dispels even the sense or
consciousness of sin, and brings us nearer to God, bringing out the highest
phenomena of the All-Mind.




Seedtime and Harvest


Let another query now be considered, which gives much trouble to many
earnest thinkers before Science answers it.


_Is anything real of which the physical senses are cognizant?_

Everything is as real as you make it, and no more so. What you see, hear,
feel, is a mode of consciousness, and can have no other reality than the
sense you entertain of it.

It is dangerous to rest upon the evidence of the senses, for this evidence
is not absolute, and therefore not real, in our sense of the word. All that
is beautiful and good in your individual consciousness is permanent. That
which is not so is illusive and fading. My insistence upon a proper
understanding of the unreality of matter and evil arises from their
deleterious effects, physical, moral, and intellectual, upon the race.

All forms of error are uprooted in Science, on the same basis whereby
sickness is healed,--namely, by the establishment, through reason,
revelation, and Science, of the nothingness of every claim of error, even
the doctrine of heredity and other physical causes. You demonstrate the
process of Science, and it proves my view conclusively, that mortal mind
is the cause of all disease. Destroy the mental sense of the disease, and
the disease itself disappears. Destroy the sense of sin, and sin itself
disappears.

Material and sensual consciousness are mortal. Hence they must, some time
and in some way, be reckoned unreal. That time has partially come, or my
words would not have been spoken. Jesus has made the way plain,--so plain
that all are without excuse who walk not in it; but this way is not the
path of physical science, human philosophy, or mystic psychology.

The talent and genius of the centuries have wrongly reckoned. They have not
based upon revelation their arguments and conclusions as to the source and
resources of being,--its combinations, phenomena, and outcome,--but have
built instead upon the sand of human reason. They have not accepted the
simple teaching and life of Jesus as the only true solution of the
perplexing problem of human existence.

Sometimes it is said, by those who fail to understand me, that I
_monopolize_; and this is said because ideas akin to mine have been held by
a few spiritual thinkers in all ages. So they have, but in a far different
form. Healing has gone on continually; yet healing, as I teach it, has not
been practised since the days of Christ.

What is the cardinal point of the difference in my metaphysical system?
This: that _by knowing the unreality of disease, sin, and death_, you
demonstrate the allness of God. This difference wholly separates my system
from all others. The reality of these so-called existences I deny, because
they are not to be found in God, and this system is built on Him as the
sole cause. It would be difficult to name any previous teachers, save Jesus
and his apostles, who have thus taught.

If there be any _monopoly_ in my teaching, it lies in this utter reliance
upon the one God, to whom belong all things.

Life is God, or Spirit, the supersensible eternal. The universe and man are
the spiritual phenomena of this one infinite Mind. Spiritual phenomena
never converge toward aught but infinite Deity. Their gradations are
spiritual and divine; they cannot collapse, or lapse into their opposites,
for God is their divine Principle. They live, because He lives; and they
are eternally perfect, because He is perfect, and governs them in the Truth
of divine Science, whereof God is the Alpha and Omega, the centre and
circumference.

To attempt the calculation of His mighty ways, from the evidence before the
material senses, is fatuous. It is like commencing with the minus sign, to
learn the principle of positive mathematics.

God was not in the whirlwind. He is not the blind force of a material
universe. Mortals must learn this; unless, pursued by their fears, they
would endeavor to hide from His presence under their own falsities, and
call in vain for the mountains of unholiness to shield them from the
penalty of error.

Jesus taught us to walk _over_, not _into_ or _with_, the currents of
matter, or mortal mind. His teachings beard the lions in their dens. He
turned the water into wine, he commanded the winds, he healed the
sick,--all in direct opposition to human philosophy and so-called natural
science. He annulled the laws of matter, showing them to be laws of mortal
mind, not of God. He showed the need of changing this mind and its abortive
laws. He demanded a change of consciousness and evidence, and effected this
change through the higher laws of God. The palsied hand moved, despite the
boastful sense of physical law and order. Jesus stooped not to human
consciousness, nor to the evidence of the senses. He heeded not the taunt,
"That withered hand looks very real and feels very real;" but he cut off
this vain boasting and destroyed human pride by taking away the material
evidence. If his patient was a theologian of some bigoted sect, a
physician, or a professor of natural philosophy,--according to the ruder
sort then prevalent,--he never thanked Jesus for restoring his senseless
hand; but neither red tape nor indignity hindered the divine process. Jesus
required neither cycles of time nor thought in order to mature fitness for
perfection and its possibilities. He said that the kingdom of heaven is
here, and is included in Mind; that while ye say, There are yet four
months, and _then_ cometh the harvest, I say, Look up, not down, for your
fields are already white for the harvest; and gather the harvest by mental,
not material processes. The laborers are few in this vineyard of
Mind-sowing and reaping; but let them apply to the waiting grain the
curving sickle of Mind's eternal circle, and bind it with bands of Soul.




The Deep Things of God


Science reverses the evidence of the senses in theology, on the same
principle that it does in astronomy. Popular theology makes God tributary
to man, coming at human call; whereas the reverse is true in Science. Men
must approach God reverently, doing their own work in obedience to divine
law, if they would fulfil the intended harmony of being.

The principle of music knows nothing of discord. God is harmony's selfhood.
His universal laws, His unchangeableness, are not infringed in ethics any
more than in music. To Him there is no moral inharmony; as we shall learn,
proportionately as we gain the true understanding of Deity. If God could be
conscious of sin, His infinite power would straightway reduce the universe
to chaos.

If God has any real knowledge of sin, sickness, and death, they must be
eternal; since He is, in the very fibre of His being, "without beginning of
years or end of days." If God knows that which is not permanent, it follows
that He knows something which He must learn to _unknow_, for the benefit of
our race.

Such a view would bring us upon an outworn theological platform, which
contains such planks as the divine repentance, and the belief that God must
one day do His work over again, because it was not at first done aright.

Can it be seriously held, by any thinker, that long after God made the
universe,--earth, man, animals, plants, the sun, the moon, and "the stars
also,"--He should so gain wisdom and power from past experience that He
could vastly improve upon His own previous work,--as Burgess, the
boatbuilder, remedies in the Volunteer the shortcomings of the Puritan's
model?

Christians are commanded to _grow in grace_. Was it necessary for God to
grow in grace, that He might rectify His spiritual universe?

The Jehovah of limited Hebrew faith might need repentance, because His
created children proved sinful; but the New Testament tells us of "the
Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."
God is not the shifting vane on the spire, but the corner-stone of living
rock, firmer than everlasting hills.

As God is Mind, if this Mind is familiar with evil, all cannot be good
therein. Our infinite model would be taken away. What is in eternal Mind
must be reflected in man, Mind's image. How then could man escape, or hope
to escape, from a knowledge which is everlasting in his creator?

God never said that man would become better by learning to distinguish evil
from good,--but the contrary, that by this knowledge, by man's first
disobedience, came "death into the world, and all our woe."

"Shall mortal man be more just than God?" asks the poet-patriarch. May men
rid themselves of an incubus which God never can throw off? Do mortals know
more than God, that they may declare Him absolutely cognizant of sin?

God created all things, and pronounced them good. Was evil among these good
things? Man is God's child and image. If God knows evil, so must man, or
the likeness is incomplete, the image marred.

If man must be destroyed by the knowledge of evil, then his destruction
comes through the very knowledge caught from God, and the creature is
punished for his likeness to his creator.

God is commonly called the _sinless_, and man the _sinful_; but if the
thought of sin could be possible in Deity, would Deity then be sinless?
Would God not of necessity take precedence as the infinite sinner, and
human sin become only an echo of the divine?

Such vagaries are to be found in heathen religious history. There are, or
have been, devotees who worship not the good Deity, who will not harm them,
but the bad deity, who seeks to do them mischief, and whom therefore they
wish to bribe with prayers into quiescence, as a criminal appeases, with a
money-bag, the venal officer.

Surely this is no Christian worship! In Christianity man bows to the
infinite perfection which he is bidden to imitate. In Truth, such
terms as _divine sin_ and _infinite sinner_ are unheard-of
contradictions,--absurdities; but _would_ they be sheer nonsense, if God
has, or can have, a real knowledge of sin?




Ways Higher than Our Ways


A lie has only one chance of successful deception,--to be accounted true.
Evil seeks to fasten all error upon God, and so make the lie seem part of
eternal Truth.

Emerson says, "Hitch your wagon to a star." I say, Be allied to the deific
power, and all that is good will aid your journey, as the stars in their
courses fought against Sisera. (Judges v. 20.) Hourly, in Christian
Science, man thus weds himself with God, or rather he ratifies a union
predestined from all eternity; but evil ties its wagon-load of offal to the
divine chariots,--or seeks so to do,--that its vileness may be christened
purity, and its darkness get consolation from borrowed scintillations.

Jesus distinctly taught the arrogant Pharisees that, from the beginning,
their father, the devil, was the would-be murderer of Truth. A right
apprehension of the wonderful utterances of him who "spake as never man
spake," would despoil error of its borrowed plumes, and transform the
universe into a home of marvellous light,--"a consummation devoutly to be
wished."

Error says God must know evil because He knows all things; but Holy Writ
declares God told our first parents that in the day when they should
partake of the fruit of evil, they must surely die. Would it not absurdly
follow that God must perish, if He knows evil and evil necessarily leads
to extinction? Rather let us think of God as saying, I am infinite good;
therefore I know not evil. Dwelling in light, I can see only the brightness
of My own glory.

Error may say that God can never save man from sin, if He knows and sees it
not; but God says, I am too pure to behold iniquity, and destroy everything
that is unlike Myself.

Many fancy that our heavenly Father reasons thus: If pain and sorrow were
not in My mind, I could not remedy them, and wipe the tears from the eyes
of My children. Error says you must know grief in order to console it.
Truth, God, says you oftenest console others in troubles that you have not.
Is not our comforter always from outside and above ourselves?

God says, I show My pity through divine law, not through human. It is My
sympathy with and My knowledge of harmony (not inharmony) which alone
enable Me to rebuke, and eventually destroy, every supposition of discord.

Error says God must know death in order to strike at its root; but God
saith, I am ever-conscious Life, and thus I conquer death; for to be ever
conscious of Life is to be never conscious of death. I am All. A knowledge
of aught beside Myself is impossible.

If such knowledge of evil were possible to God, it would lower His rank.

With God, _knowledge_ is necessarily _foreknowledge_; and _foreknowledge_
and _foreordination_ must be one, in an infinite Being. What Deity
_foreknows_, Deity must _foreordain_; else He is not omnipotent, and, like
ourselves, He foresees events which are contrary to His creative will, yet
which He cannot avert.

If God knows evil at all, He must have had foreknowledge thereof; and if He
foreknew it, He must virtually have intended it, or ordered it
aforetime,--foreordained it; else how could it have come into the world?

But this we cannot believe of God; for if the supreme good could predestine
or foreknow evil, there would be sin in Deity, and this would be the end of
infinite moral unity. "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness,
how great is that darkness!" On the contrary, evil is only a delusive
deception, without any actuality which Truth can know.




Rectifications


How is a mistake to be rectified? By reversal or revision,--by seeing it in
its proper light, and then turning it or turning from it.

We undo the statements of error by reversing them.

Through these three statements, or misstatements, evil comes into
authority:--

    _First:_ The Lord created it.
    _Second:_ The Lord knows it.
    _Third:_ I am afraid of it.

By a reverse process of argument evil must be dethroned:--

    _First:_ God never made evil.
    _Second:_ He knows it not.
    _Third:_ We therefore need not fear it.

Try this process, dear inquirer, and so reach that perfect Love which
"casteth out fear," and then see if this Love does not destroy in you all
hate and the sense of evil. You will awake to the perception of God as
All-in-all. You will find yourself losing the knowledge and the operation
of sin, proportionably as you realize the divine infinitude and believe
that He can see nothing outside of His own focal distance.




A Colloquy


In Romans (ii. 15) we read the apostle's description of mental processes
wherein human thoughts are "the mean while accusing or else excusing one
another." If we observe our mental processes, we shall find that we are
perpetually arguing with ourselves; yet each mortal is not two
personalities, but one.

In like manner good and evil talk to one another; yet they are not two but
one, for evil is naught, and good only is reality.

_Evil._ God hath said, "Ye shall eat of every tree of the garden." If you
do not, your intellect will be circumscribed and the evidence of your
personal senses be denied. This would antagonize individual consciousness
and existence.

_Good._ The Lord is God. With Him is no consciousness of evil, because
there is nothing beside Him or outside of Him. Individual consciousness in
man is inseparable from good. There is no sensible matter, no sense in
matter; but there is a spiritual sense, a sense of Spirit, and this is the
only consciousness belonging to true individuality, or a divine sense of
being.

_Evil._ Why is this so?

_Good._ Because man is made after God's eternal likeness, and this likeness
consists in a sense of harmony and immortality, in which no evil can
possibly dwell. You may eat of the fruit of Godlikeness, but as to the
fruit of ungodliness, which is opposed to Truth,--ye shall not touch it,
lest ye die.

_Evil._ But I would taste and know error for myself.

_Good._ Thou shalt not admit that error is something to know or be known,
to eat or be eaten, to see or be seen, to feel or be felt. To admit the
existence of error would be to admit the truth of a lie.

_Evil._ But there is something besides good. God knows that a knowledge of
this something is essential to happiness and life. A lie is as genuine as
Truth, though not so legitimate a child of God. Whatever exists must come
from God, and be important to our knowledge. Error, even, is His offspring.

_Good._ Whatever cometh not from the eternal Spirit, has its origin in the
physical senses and material brains, called _human intellect_ and
_will-power_,--_alias_ intelligent matter.

In Shakespeare's tragedy of King Lear, it was the traitorous and cruel
treatment received by old Gloster from his bastard son Edmund which makes
true the lines:

    The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
    Make instruments to scourge us.

His lawful son, Edgar, was to his father ever loyal. Now God has no
bastards to turn again and rend their Maker. The divine children are born
of law and order, and Truth knows only such.

How well the Shakespearean tale agrees with the word of Scripture, in
Hebrews xii. 7, 8: "If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with
sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if ye be
without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and
not sons."

The doubtful or spurious evidence of the senses is not to be
admitted,--especially when they testify concerning Spirit, whereof they are
confessedly incompetent to speak.

_Evil._ But mortal mind and sin really exist!

_Good._ How can they exist, unless God has created them? And how can He
create anything so wholly unlike Himself and foreign to His nature? An evil
material mind, so-called, can conceive of God only as like itself, and
knowing both evil and good; but a purely good and spiritual consciousness
has no sense whereby to cognize evil. Mortal mind is the opposite of
immortal Mind, and sin the opposite of goodness. I am the infinite All.
From me proceedeth all Mind, all consciousness, all individuality, all
being. My Mind is divine good, and cannot drift into evil. To believe in
minds many is to depart from the supreme sense of harmony. Your assumptions
insist that there is more than the one Mind, more than the one God; but
verily I say unto you, God is All-in-all; and you can never be outside of
His oneness.

_Evil._ I am a finite consciousness, a material individuality,--a mind in
matter, which is both evil and good.

_Good._ All consciousness is Mind; and Mind is God,--an infinite, and not a
finite consciousness. This consciousness is reflected in individual
consciousness, or man, whose source is infinite Mind. There is no really
finite mind, no finite consciousness. There is no material substance, for
Spirit is all that endureth, and hence is the only substance. There is, can
be, no evil mind, because Mind is God. God and His ideas--that is, God and
the universe--constitute all that exists. Man, as God's offspring, must be
spiritual, perfect, eternal.

_Evil._ I am something separate from good or God. I am substance. My mind
is more than matter. In my mortal mind, matter becomes conscious, and is
able to see, taste, hear, feel, smell. Whatever matter thus affirms is
mainly correct. If you, O good, deny this, then I deny your truthfulness.
If you say that matter is unconscious, you stultify my intellect, insult my
conscience, and dispute self-evident facts; for nothing can be clearer than
the testimony of the five senses.

_Good._ Spirit is the only substance. Spirit is God, and God is good; hence
good is the only substance, the only Mind. Mind is not, cannot be, in
matter. It sees, hears, feels, tastes, smells as Mind, and not as matter.
Matter cannot talk; and hence, whatever it appears to say of itself is a
lie. This lie, that Mind can be in matter,--claiming to be something beside
God, denying Truth and its demonstration in Christian Science,--this lie I
declare an illusion. This denial enlarges the human intellect by removing
its evidence from sense to Soul, and from finiteness into infinity. It
honors conscious human individuality by showing God as its source.

_Evil._ I am a creator,--but upon a material, not a spiritual basis. I give
life, and I can destroy life.

_Good._ Evil is not a creator. God, good, is the only creator. Evil is not
conscious or conscientious Mind; it is not individual, not actual. Evil is
not spiritual, and therefore has no groundwork in Life, whose only source
is Spirit. The elements which belong to the eternal All,--Life, Truth,
Love,--evil can never take away.

_Evil._ I am intelligent matter; and matter is egoistic, having its own
innate selfhood and the capacity to evolve mind. God is in matter, and
matter reproduces God. From Him come my forms, near or remote. This is my
honor, that God is my author, authority, governor, disposer. I am proud to
be in His outstretched hands, and I shirk all responsibility for myself as
evil, and for my varying manifestations.

_Good._ You mistake, O evil! God is not your authority and law. Neither is
He the author of the material changes, the _phantasma_, a belief in which
leads to such teaching as we find in the hymn-verse so often sung in
church:--

    Chance and change are busy ever,
      Man decays and ages move;
    But His mercy waneth never,--
      God is wisdom, God is love.

Now if it be true that God's power _never waneth_, how can it be also true
that _chance_ and _change_ are universal factors,--that _man decays_? Many
ordinary Christians protest against this stanza of Bowring's, and its
sentiment is foreign to Christian Science. If God be _changeless goodness_,
as sings another line of this hymn, what place has _chance_ in the divine
economy? Nay, there is in God naught fantastic. All is real, all is
serious. The phantasmagoria is a product of human dreams.




The Ego


From various friends comes inquiry as to the meaning of a word employed in
the foregoing colloquy.

There are two English words, often used as if they were synonyms, which
really have a shade of difference between them.

An _egotist_ is one who talks much of himself. _Egotism_ implies vanity and
self-conceit.

_Egoism_ is a more philosophical word, signifying a passionate love of
self, which doubts all existence except its own. An _egoist_, therefore, is
one uncertain of everything except his own existence.

Applying these distinctions to evil and God, we shall find that evil is
_egotistic_,--boastful, but fleeing like a shadow at daybreak; while God is
_egoistic_, knowing only His own all-presence, all-knowledge, all-power.




Soul


We read in the Hebrew Scriptures, "The soul that sinneth, it shall die."

What is Soul? Is it a reality within the mortal body? Who can prove that?
Anatomy has not descried nor described Soul. It was never touched by the
scalpel nor cut with the dissecting-knife. The five physical senses do not
cognize it.

Who, then, dares define Soul as something within man? As well might you
declare some old castle to be peopled with demons or angels, though never a
light or form was discerned therein, and not a spectre had ever been seen
going in or coming out.

The common hypotheses about souls are even more vague than ordinary
material conjectures, and have less basis; because material theories are
built on the evidence of the material senses.

Soul must be God; since we learn Soul only as we learn God, by
spiritualization. As the five senses take no cognizance of Soul, so they
take no cognizance of God. Whatever cannot be taken in by mortal mind--by
human reflection, reason, or belief--must be the unfathomable Mind, which
"eye hath not seen, nor ear heard." Soul stands in this relation to every
hypothesis as to its human character.

If Soul sins, it is a sinner, and Jewish law condemned the sinner to
death,--as does all criminal law, to a certain extent.

Spirit never sins, because Spirit is God. Hence, as Spirit, Soul is
sinless, and is God. Therefore there is, there can be, no spiritual death.

Transcending the evidence of the material senses, Science declares God to
be the Soul of all being, the only Mind and intelligence in the universe.
There is but one God, one Soul, or Mind, and that one is infinite,
supplying all that is absolutely immutable and eternal,--Truth, Life, Love.

Science reveals Soul as that which the senses cannot define from any
standpoint of their own. What the physical senses miscall soul, Christian
Science defines as material sense; and herein lies the discrepancy between
the true Science of Soul and that material sense of a soul which that very
sense declares can never be seen or measured or weighed or touched by
physicality.

Often we can elucidate the deep meaning of the Scriptures by reading
_sense_ instead of _soul_, as in the Forty-second Psalm: "Why art thou cast
down, O my soul [sense]?... Hope thou in God [Soul]: for I shall yet praise
Him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God [my Soul,
immortality]."

The Virgin-mother's sense being uplifted to behold Spirit as the sole
origin of man, she exclaimed, "My soul [spiritual sense] doth magnify the
Lord."

Human language constantly uses the word _soul_ for _sense_. This it does
under the delusion that the senses can reverse the spiritual facts of
Science, whereas Science reverses the testimony of the material senses.

Soul is Life, and being spiritual Life, never sins. Material sense is the
so-called material life. Hence this lower sense sins and suffers, according
to material belief, till divine understanding takes away this belief and
restores Soul, or spiritual Life. "He restoreth my soul," says David.

In his first epistle to the Corinthians (xv. 45) Paul writes: "The first
man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening
spirit." The apostle refers to the second Adam as the Messiah, our blessed
Master, whose interpretation of God and His creation--by restoring the
spiritual sense of man as immortal instead of mortal--made humanity
victorious over death and the grave.

When I discovered the power of Spirit to break the cords of matter, through
a change in the mortal sense of things, then I discerned the last Adam as a
quickening Spirit, and understood the meaning of the declaration of Holy
Writ, "The first shall be last,"--the living Soul shall be found a
quickening Spirit; or, rather, shall reflect the Life of the divine
Arbiter.




There is no Matter


"God is a Spirit" (or, more accurately translated, "God is Spirit"),
declares the Scripture (John iv. 24), "and they that worship Him must
worship Him in spirit and in truth."

If God is Spirit, and God is All, surely there can be no matter; for the
divine All must be Spirit.

The tendency of Christianity is to spiritualize thought and action. The
demonstrations of Jesus annulled the claims of matter, and overruled laws
material as emphatically as they annihilated sin.

According to Christian Science, the _first_ idolatrous claim of sin is,
that matter exists; the _second_, that matter is substance; the _third_,
that matter has intelligence; and the _fourth_, that matter, being so
endowed, produces life and death.

Hence my conscientious position, in the denial of matter, rests on the fact
that matter usurps the authority of God, Spirit; and the nature and
character of matter, the antipode of Spirit, include all that denies and
defies Spirit, in quantity or quality.

This subject can be enlarged. It can be shown, in detail, that evil does
not obtain in Spirit, God; and that God, or good, is Spirit alone; whereas,
evil _does_, according to belief, obtain in matter; and that evil is a
false claim,--false to God, false to Truth and Life. Hence the claim of
matter usurps the prerogative of God, saying, "I am a creator. God made me,
and I make man and the material universe."

Spirit is the only creator, and man, including the universe, is His
spiritual concept. By matter is commonly meant mind,--not the highest Mind,
but a false form of mind. This so-called mind and matter cannot be
separated in origin and action.

What is this mind? It is not the Mind of Spirit; for spiritualization of
thought destroys all sense of matter as substance, Life, or intelligence,
and enthrones God in the eternal qualities of His being.

This lower, misnamed mind is a false claim, a suppositional mind, which I
prefer to call _mortal mind_. True Mind is immortal. This mortal mind
declares itself material, in sin, sickness, and death, virtually saying, "I
am the opposite of Spirit, of holiness, harmony, and Life."

To this declaration Christian Science responds, even as did our Master:
"You were a murderer from the beginning. The truth abode not in you. You
are a liar, and the father of it." Here it appears that a _liar_ was in the
neuter gender,--neither masculine nor feminine. Hence it was not man (the
image of God) who lied, but the false claim to personality, which I call
_mortal mind_; a claim which Christian Science uncovers, in order to
demonstrate the falsity of the claim.

There are lesser arguments which prove matter to be identical with mortal
mind, and this mind a lie.

The physical senses (matter really having no sense) give the only pretended
testimony there can be as to the existence of a substance called _matter_.
Now these senses, being material, can only testify from their own evidence,
and concerning themselves; yet we have it on divine authority: "If I bear
witness of myself, my witness is not true." (John v. 31.)

In other words: matter testifies of itself, "I am matter;" but unless
matter is mind, it cannot talk or testify; and if it is mind, it is
certainly not the Mind of Christ, not the Mind that is identical with
Truth.

Brain, thus assuming to testify, is only matter within the skull, and is
believed to be mind only through error and delusion. Examine that form of
matter called _brains_, and you find no mind therein. Hence the logical
sequence, that there is in reality neither matter nor mortal mind, but that
the self-testimony of the physical senses is false.

Examine these witnesses for error, or falsity, and observe the foundations
of their testimony, and you will find them divided in evidence, mocking the
Scripture (Matthew xviii. 16), "In the mouth of two or three witnesses
every word may be established."


_Sight._ Mortal mind declares that matter sees through the organizations of
matter, or that mind sees by means of matter. Disorganize the so-called
material structure, and then mortal mind says, "I cannot see;" and declares
that matter is the master of mind, and that non-intelligence governs.
Mortal mind admits that it sees only material images, pictured on the eye's
retina.

What then is the line of the syllogism? It must be this: That matter is not
seen; that mortal mind cannot see without matter; and therefore that the
whole function of material sight is an illusion, a lie.

Here comes in the summary of the whole matter, wherewith we started: that
God is All, and God is Spirit; therefore there is nothing but Spirit; and
consequently there is no matter.


_Touch_. Take another train of reasoning. Mortal mind says that matter
cannot feel matter; yet put your finger on a burning coal, and the nerves,
material nerves, _do_ feel matter.

Again I ask: What evidence does mortal mind afford that matter is
substantial, is hot or cold? Take away mortal mind, and matter could not
feel what it calls _substance_. Take away matter, and mortal mind could not
cognize its own so-called substance, and this so-called mind would have no
identity. Nothing would remain to be seen or felt.

What is substance? What is the reality of God and the universe? Immortal
Mind is the real substance,--Spirit, Life, Truth, and Love.

_Taste._ Mortal mind says, "I taste; and this is sweet, this is sour." Let
mortal mind change, and say that sour is sweet, and so it would be. If
every mortal mind believed sweet to be sour, it would be so; for the
qualities of matter are but qualities of mortal mind. Change the mind, and
the quality changes. Destroy the belief, and the quality disappears.

The so-called material senses are found, upon examination, to be mortally
mental, instead of material. Reduced to its proper denomination, matter is
mortal mind; yet, strictly speaking, there is no mortal mind, for Mind is
immortal, and is not matter, but Spirit.

_Force._ What is gravitation? Mortal mind says gravitation is a material
power, or force. I ask, Which was first, matter or power? That which was
first was God, immortal Mind, the Parent of _all_. But God is Truth, and
the forces of Truth are moral and spiritual, not physical. They are not the
merciless forces of matter. What then _are_ the so-called forces of matter?
They are the phenomena of mortal mind, and matter and mortal mind are one;
and this one is a misstatement of Mind, God.

A molecule, as matter, is not formed by Spirit; for Spirit is _spiritual_
consciousness alone. Hence this spiritual consciousness can form nothing
unlike itself, Spirit, and Spirit is the only creator. The material atom is
an outlined falsity of consciousness, which can gather additional evidence
of consciousness and life only as it adds lie to lie. This process it names
material attraction, and endows with the double capacity of creator and
creation.

From the beginning this lie was the false witness against the fact that
Spirit is All, beside which there is no other existence. The use of a lie
is that it unwittingly confirms Truth, when handled by Christian Science,
which reverses false testimony and gains a knowledge of God from opposite
facts, or phenomena.

This whole subject is met and solved by Christian Science according to
Scripture. Thus we see that Spirit is Truth and eternal reality; that
matter is the opposite of Spirit,--referred to in the New Testament as the
flesh at war with Spirit; hence, that matter is erroneous, transitory,
unreal.

A further proof of this is the demonstration, according to Christian
Science, that by the reduction and the rejection of the claims of matter
(instead of acquiescence therein) man is improved physically, mentally,
morally, spiritually.

To deny the existence or reality of matter, and yet admit the reality of
moral evil, sin, or to say that the divine Mind is conscious of evil, yet
is not conscious of matter, is erroneous. This error stultifies the logic
of divine Science, and must interfere with its practical demonstration.




Is There no Death?


Jesus not only declared himself "the way" and "the truth," but also "the
life." God is Life; and as there is but one God, there can be but one Life.
Must man die, then, in order to inherit eternal life and enter heaven?

Our Master said, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand." Then God and heaven,
or Life, are present, and death is not the real stepping-stone to Life and
happiness. They are now and here; and a change in human consciousness, from
sin to holiness, would reveal this wonder of being. Because God is ever
present, no boundary of time can separate us from Him and the heaven of His
presence; and because God is Life, all Life is eternal.

Is it unchristian to believe there is no death? Not unless it be a sin to
believe that God is Life and All-in-all. Evil and disease do not testify of
Life and God.

Human beings are physically mortal, but spiritually immortal. The evil
accompanying physical personality is illusive and mortal; but the good
attendant upon spiritual individuality is immortal. Existing here and now,
this unseen individuality is real and eternal. The so-called material
senses, and the mortal mind which is misnamed _man_, take no cognizance of
spiritual individuality, which manifests immortality, whose Principle is
God.

To God alone belong the indisputable realities of being. Death is a
contradiction of Life, or God; therefore it is not in accordance with His
law, but antagonistic thereto.

Death, then, is error, opposed to Truth,--even the unreality of mortal
mind, not the reality of that Mind which is Life. Error has no life, and is
virtually without existence. Life is real; and all is real which proceeds
from Life and is inseparable from it.

It is unchristian to believe in the transition called _material death_,
since matter has no life, and such misbelief must enthrone another power,
an imaginary life, above the living and true God. A material sense of life
robs God, by declaring that not He alone is Life, but that something else
also is life,--thus affirming the existence and rulership of more gods than
one. This idolatrous and false sense of life is all that dies, or appears
to die.

The opposite understanding of God brings to light Life and immortality.
Death has no quality of Life; and no divine fiat commands us to believe in
aught which is unlike God, or to deny that He is Life eternal.

Life as God, moral and spiritual good, is not seen in the mineral,
vegetable, or animal kingdoms. Hence the inevitable conclusion that Life is
not in these kingdoms, and that the popular views to this effect are not up
to the Christian standard of Life, or equal to the reality of being, whose
Principle is God.

When "the Word" is "made flesh" among mortals, the Truth of Life is
rendered practical on the body. Eternal Life is partially understood; and
sickness, sin, and death yield to holiness, health, and Life,--that is, to
God. The lust of the flesh and the pride of physical life must be quenched
in the divine essence,--that omnipotent Love which annihilates hate, that
Life which knows no death.

"Who hath believed our report?" Who understands these sayings? He to whom
the arm of the Lord is revealed. He loves them from whom divine Science
removes human weakness by divine strength, and who unveil the Messiah,
whose name is Wonderful.

Man has no underived power. That selfhood is false which opposes itself to
God, claims another father, and denies spiritual sonship; but as many as
receive the knowledge of God in Science must reflect, in some degree, the
power of Him who gave and giveth man dominion over all the earth.

As soldiers of the cross we must be brave, and let Science declare the
immortal status of man, and deny the evidence of the material senses, which
testify that man dies.

As the image of God, or Life, man forever reflects and embodies Life, not
death. The material senses testify falsely. They presuppose that God is
good and that man is evil, that Deity is deathless, but that man dies,
losing the divine likeness.

Science and material sense conflict at all points, from the revolution of
the earth to the fall of a sparrow. It is mortality only that dies.

To say that you and I, as mortals, will not enter this dark shadow of
material sense, called _death_, is to assert what we have not proved; but
man in Science never dies. Material sense, or the belief of life in matter,
must perish, in order to prove man deathless.

As Truth supersedes error, and bears the fruits of Love, this understanding
of Truth subordinates the belief in death, and demonstrates Life as
imperative in the divine order of being.

Jesus declares that they who believe his sayings will never die; therefore
mortals can no more receive everlasting life by believing in death, than
they can become perfect by believing in imperfection and living
imperfectly.

Life is God, and God is good. Hence Life abides in man, if man abides in
good, if he lives in God, who holds Life by a spiritual and not by a
material sense of being.

A sense of death is not requisite to a proper or true sense of Life, but
beclouds it. Death can never alarm or even appear to him who fully
understands Life. The death-penalty comes through our ignorance of
Life,--of that which is without beginning and without end,--and is the
punishment of this ignorance.

Holding a material sense of Life, and lacking the spiritual sense of it,
mortals die, in belief, and regard all things as temporal. A sense material
apprehends nothing strictly belonging to the nature and office of Life. It
conceives and beholds nothing but mortality, and has but a feeble concept
of immortality.

In order to reach the true knowledge and consciousness of Life, we must
learn it of good. Of evil we can never learn it, because sin shuts out the
real sense of Life, and brings in an unreal sense of suffering and death.

Knowledge of evil, or belief in it, involves a loss of the true sense of
good, God; and to know death, or to believe in it, involves a temporary
loss of God, the infinite and only Life.

Resurrection from the dead (that is, from the belief in death) must come to
all sooner or later; and they who have part in this resurrection are they
upon whom the second death has no power.

The sweet and sacred sense of the permanence of man's unity with his Maker
can illumine our present being with a continual presence and power of good,
opening wide the portal from death into Life; and when this Life shall
appear "we shall be like Him," and we shall go to the Father, not through
death, but through Life; not through error, but through Truth.

All Life is Spirit, and Spirit can never dwell in its antagonist, matter.
Life, therefore, is deathless, because God cannot be the opposite of
Himself. In Christian Science there is no matter; hence matter neither
lives nor dies. To the senses, matter appears to both live and die, and
these phenomena appear to go on _ad infinitum_; but such a theory implies
perpetual disagreement with Spirit.

Life, God, being everywhere, it must follow that death can be nowhere;
because there is no place left for it.

Soul, Spirit, is deathless. Matter, sin, and death are not the outcome of
Spirit, holiness, and Life. What then are matter, sin, and death? They can
be nothing except the results of material consciousness; but material
consciousness can have no real existence, because it is not a living--that
is to say, a divine and intelligent--reality.

That man must be vicious before he can be virtuous, dying before he can be
deathless, material before he can be spiritual, is an error of the senses;
for the very opposite of this error is the genuine Science of being.

Man, in Science, is as perfect and immortal now, as when "the morning stars
sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."

With Christ, Life was not merely a sense of existence, but a sense of might
and ability to subdue material conditions. No wonder "people were
astonished at his doctrine; for he taught them as one having authority, and
not as the scribes."

As defined by Jesus, Life had no beginning; nor was it the result of
organization, or of an infusion of power into matter. To him, Life was
Spirit.

Truth, defiant of error or matter, is Science, dispelling a false sense and
leading man into the true sense of selfhood and Godhood; wherein the mortal
does not develop the immortal, nor the material the spiritual, but wherein
true manhood and womanhood go forth in the radiance of eternal being and
its perfections, unchanged and unchangeable.

This generation seems too material for any strong demonstration over death,
and hence cannot bring out the infinite reality of Life,--namely, that
there is no death, but only Life. The present mortal sense of being is too
finite for anchorage in infinite good, God, because mortals now believe in
the possibility that Life can be evil.

The achievement of this ultimatum of Science, complete triumph over death,
requires time and immense spiritual growth.

I have by no means spoken of myself, I _cannot_ speak of myself as
"sufficient for these things." I insist only upon the fact, as it exists in
divine Science, that man dies not, and on the words of the Master in
support of this verity,--words which can never "pass away till all be
fulfilled."

Because of these profound reasons I urge Christians to have more faith in
living than in dying. I exhort them to accept Christ's promise, and unite
the influence of their own thoughts with the power of his teachings, in the
Science of being. This will interpret the divine power to human capacity,
and enable us to _apprehend_, or lay hold upon, "that for which," as Paul
says in the third chapter of Philippians, we are also "apprehended of [or
grasped by] Christ Jesus,"--the ever-present Life which knows no death, the
omnipresent Spirit which knows no matter.




Personal Statements


Many misrepresentations are made concerning my doctrines, some of which are
as unkind and unjust as they are untrue; but I can only repeat the Master's
words: "They know not what they do."

The foundations of these assertions, like the structure raised thereupon,
are vain shadows, repeating--if the popular couplet may be so paraphrased--

            The old, old story,
    Of _Satan_ and his _lie_.

In the days of Eden, humanity was misled by a false personality,--a talking
snake,--according to Biblical history. This pretender taught the opposite
of Truth. This abortive ego, this fable of error, is laid bare in Christian
Science.

Human theories call, or miscall, this evil a child of God. Philosophy would
multiply and subdivide personality into everything that exists, whether
expressive or not expressive of the Mind which is God. Human wisdom says of
evil, "The Lord knows it!" thus carrying out the serpent's assurance: "In
the day ye eat thereof [when you, lie, get the floor], then your eyes shall
be opened [you shall be conscious matter], and ye shall be as gods, knowing
good and evil [you shall believe a lie, and this lie shall seem truth]."

Bruise the head of this serpent, as Truth and "the woman" are doing in
Christian Science, and it stings your heel, rears its crest proudly, and
goes on saying, "Am I not myself? Am I not mind and matter, person and
thing?" We should answer: "Yes! you are indeed yourself, and need most of
all to be rid of this self, for it is very far from God's likeness."

The egotist must come down and learn, in humility, that God never made
evil. An evil ego, and his assumed power, are falsities. These falsities
need a denial. The falsity is the teaching that matter can be conscious;
and conscious matter implies pantheism. This pantheism I unveil. I try to
show its all-pervading presence in certain forms of theology and
philosophy, where it becomes error's affirmative to Truth's negative.
Anatomy and physiology make mind-matter a habitant of the cerebellum,
whence it telegraphs and telephones over its own body, and goes forth into
an imaginary sphere of its own creation and limitation, until it finally
dies in order to better itself. But Truth never dies, and death is not the
goal which Truth seeks.

The evil ego has but the visionary substance of matter. It lacks the
substance of Spirit,--Mind, Life, Soul. Mortal mind is self-creative and
self-sustained, until it becomes non-existent. It has no origin or
existence in Spirit, immortal Mind, or good. Matter is not truly conscious;
and mortal error, called _mind_, is not Godlike. These are the shadowy and
false, which neither think nor speak.

All Truth is from inspiration and revelation,--from Spirit, not from flesh.

We do not see much of the real man here, for he is God's man; while ours is
man's man.

I do not deny, I maintain, the individuality and reality of man; but I do
so on a divine Principle, not based on a human conception and birth. The
scientific man and his Maker are here; and you would be none other than
this man, if you would subordinate the fleshly perceptions to the spiritual
sense and source of being.

Jesus said, "I and my Father are one." He taught no selfhood as existent in
matter. In his identity there is no evil. Individuality and Life were real
to him only as spiritual and good, not as material or evil. This incensed
the rabbins against Jesus, because it was an indignity to their
personality; and this personality they regarded as both good and evil, as
is still claimed by the worldly-wise. To them evil was even more the ego
than was the good. Sin, sickness, and death were evil's concomitants. This
evil ego they believed must extend throughout the universe, as being
equally identical and self-conscious with God. This ego was in the
earthquake, thunderbolt, and tempest.

The Pharisees fought Jesus on this issue. It furnished the battle-ground of
the past, as it does of the present. The fight was an effort to enthrone
evil. Jesus assumed the burden of disproof by destroying sin, sickness,
and death, to sight and sense.

Nowhere in Scripture is evil connected with good, the being of God, and
with every passing hour it is losing its false claim to existence or
consciousness. All that can exist is God and His idea.




Credo


It is fair to ask of every one a reason for the faith within. Though it be
but to repeat my twice-told tale,--nay, the tale already told a hundred
times,--yet ask, and I will answer.

_Do you believe in God?_

I believe more in Him than do most Christians, for I have no faith in any
other thing or being. He sustains my individuality. Nay, more--He _is_ my
individuality and my Life. Because He lives, I live. He heals all my ills,
destroys my iniquities, deprives death of its sting, and robs the grave of
its victory.

To me God is All. He is best understood as Supreme Being, as infinite and
conscious Life, as the affectionate Father and Mother of all He creates;
but this divine Parent no more enters into His creation than the human
father enters into his child. His creation is not the Ego, but the
reflection of the Ego. The Ego is God Himself, the infinite Soul.

I believe that of which I am conscious through the understanding, however
faintly able to demonstrate Truth and Love.

_Do you believe in man?_

I believe in the individual man, for I understand that man is as definite
and eternal as God, and that man is coexistent with God, as being the
eternally divine idea. This is demonstrable by the simple appeal to human
consciousness.

But I believe less in the sinner, wrongly named _man_. The more I
understand true humanhood, the more I see it to be sinless,--as ignorant of
sin as is the perfect Maker.

To me the reality and substance of being are _good_, and nothing else.
Through the eternal reality of existence I reach, in thought, a glorified
consciousness of the only living God and the genuine man. So long as I hold
evil in consciousness, I cannot be wholly good.

You cannot simultaneously serve the mammon of materiality and the God of
spirituality. There are not two realities of being, two opposite states of
existence. One should appear real to us, and the other unreal, or we lose
the Science of being. Standing in no basic Truth, we make "the worse appear
the better reason," and the unreal masquerades as the real, in our thought.

Evil is without Principle. Being destitute of Principle, it is devoid of
Science. Hence it is undemonstrable, without proof. This gives me a clearer
right to call evil a negation, than to affirm it to be something which God
sees and knows, but which He straightway commands mortals to shun or
relinquish, lest it destroy them. This notion of the destructibility of
Mind implies the possibility of its defilement; but how can infinite Mind
be defiled?

_Do you believe in matter_?

I believe in matter only as I believe in evil, that it is something to be
denied and destroyed to human consciousness, and is unknown to the Divine.
We should watch and pray that we enter not into the temptation of
pantheistic belief in matter as sensible mind. We should subjugate it as
Jesus did, by a dominant understanding of Spirit.

At best, matter is only a phenomenon of mortal mind, of which evil is the
highest degree; but really there is no such thing as _mortal mind_,--though
we are compelled to use the phrase in the endeavor to express the
underlying thought.

In reality there are no material states or stages of consciousness, and
matter has neither Mind nor sensation. Like evil, it is destitute of Mind,
for Mind is God.

The less consciousness of evil or matter mortals have, the easier it is for
them to evade sin, sickness, and death,--which are but states of false
belief,--and awake from the troubled dream, a consciousness which is
without Mind or Maker.

Matter and evil cannot be conscious, and consciousness should not be evil.
Adopt this rule of Science, and you will discover the material origin,
growth, maturity, and death of sinners, as the history of man, disappears,
and the everlasting facts of being appear, wherein man is the reflection
of immutable good.

Reasoning from false premises,--that Life is material, that immortal Soul
is sinful, and hence that sin is eternal,--the reality of being is neither
seen, felt, heard, nor understood. Human philosophy and human reason can
never make one hair white or black, except in belief; whereas the
demonstration of God, as in Christian Science, is gained through Christ as
perfect manhood.

In pantheism the world is bereft of its God, whose place is ill supplied by
the pretentious usurpation, by matter, of the heavenly sovereignty.

_What say you of woman?_

Man is the generic term for all humanity. Woman is the highest species of
man, and this word is the generic term for all women; but not one of all
these individualities is an Eve or an Adam. They have none of them lost
their harmonious state, in the economy of God's wisdom and government.

The Ego is divine consciousness, eternally radiating throughout all space
in the idea of God, good, and not of His opposite, evil. The Ego is
revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; but the full Truth is found only
in divine Science, where we see God as Life, Truth, and Love. In the
scientific relation of man to God, man is reflected not as human soul, but
as the divine ideal, whose Soul is not in body, but is God,--the divine
Principle of man. Hence Soul is sinless and immortal, in contradistinction
to the supposition that there can be sinful souls or immortal sinners.

This Science of God and man is the Holy Ghost, which reveals and sustains
the unbroken and eternal harmony of both God and the universe. It is the
kingdom of heaven, the ever-present reign of harmony, already with us.
Hence the need that human consciousness should become divine, in the
coincidence of God and man, in contradistinction to the false consciousness
of both good and evil, God and devil,--of man separated from his Maker.
This is the precious redemption of soul, as mortal sense, through Christ's
immortal sense of Truth, which presents Truth's spiritual idea, _man_ and
_woman_.

_What say you of evil?_

God is not the so-called ego of evil; for evil, as a supposition, is the
father of itself,--of the material world, the flesh, and the devil. From
this falsehood arise the self-destroying elements of this world, its unkind
forces, its tempests, lightnings, earthquakes, poisons, rabid beasts, fatal
reptiles, and mortals.

Why are earth and mortals so elaborate in beauty, color, and form, if God
has no part in them? By the law of opposites. The most beautiful blossom is
often poisonous, and the most beautiful mansion is sometimes the home of
vice. The senses, not God, Soul, form the condition of beautiful evil, and
the supposed modes of self-conscious matter, which make a beautiful lie.
Now a lie takes its pattern from Truth, by reversing Truth. So evil and all
its forms are inverted good. God never made them; but the lie must say He
made them, or it would not be evil. Being a lie, it would be truthful to
call itself a lie; and by calling the knowledge of evil good, and greatly
to be desired, it constitutes the lie an evil.

The reality and individuality of man are good and God-made, and they are
here to be seen and demonstrated; it is only the evil belief that renders
them obscure.

Matter and evil are anti-Christian, the antipodes of Science. To say that
Mind is material, or that evil is Mind, is a misapprehension of being,--a
mistake which will die of its own delusion; for being self-contradictory,
it is also self-destructive. The harmony of man's being is not built on
such false foundations, which are no more logical, philosophical, or
scientific than would be the assertion that the rule of addition is the
rule of subtraction, and that sums done under both rules would have one
quotient.

Man's individuality is not a mortal mind or sinner; or else he has lost his
true individuality as a perfect child of God. Man's Father is not a mortal
mind and a sinner; or else the immortal and unerring Mind, God, is not his
Father; but God _is_ man's origin and loving Father, hence that saying of
Jesus, "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father,
which is in heaven."

The bright gold of Truth is dimmed by the doctrine of mind in matter.

To say there _is_ a false claim, called _sickness_, is to admit all there
is of sickness; for it is nothing but a false claim. To be healed, one must
lose sight of a false claim. If the claim be present to the thought, then
disease becomes as tangible as any reality. To regard sickness as a false
claim, is to abate the fear of it; but this does not destroy the so-called
fact of the _claim_. In order to be whole, we must be insensible to every
claim of error.

As with sickness, so is it with sin. To admit that sin has any claim
whatever, just or unjust, is to admit a dangerous fact. Hence the fact must
be denied; for if sin's claim be allowed in any degree, then sin destroys
the _at-one-ment_, or oneness with God,--a unity which sin recognizes as
its most potent and deadly enemy.

If God knows sin, even as a false claimant, then acquaintance with that
claimant becomes legitimate to mortals, and this knowledge would not be
forbidden; but God forbade man to know evil at the very beginning, when
Satan held it up before man as something desirable and a distinct addition
to human wisdom, because the knowledge of evil would make man a god,--a
representation that God both knew and admitted the dignity of evil.

Which is right,--God, who condemned the knowledge of sin and disowned its
acquaintance, or the serpent, who pushed that claim with the glittering
audacity of diabolical and sinuous logic?




Suffering from Others' Thoughts


Jesus accepted the one fact whereby alone the rule of Life can be
demonstrated,--namely, that there is no death.

In his real self he bore no infirmities. Though "a man of sorrows, and
acquainted with grief," as Isaiah says of him, he bore not _his_ sins, but
_ours_, "in his own body on the tree." "He was bruised for _our_
iniquities; ... and with his stripes we are healed."

He was the Way-shower; and Christian Scientists who would demonstrate "the
way" must keep close to his path, that they may win the prize. "The way,"
in the flesh, is the suffering which leads out of the flesh. "The way," in
Spirit, is "the way" of Life, Truth, and Love, redeeming us from the false
sense of the flesh and the wounds it bears. This threefold Messiah reveals
the self-destroying ways of error and the life-giving way of Truth.

Job's faith and hope gained him the assurance that the so-called sufferings
of the flesh are unreal. We shall learn how false are the pleasures and
pains of material sense, and behold the truth of being, as expressed in his
conviction, "Yet in my flesh shall I see God;" that is, Now and here shall
I behold God, divine Love.

The chaos of mortal mind is made the stepping-stone to the cosmos of
immortal Mind.

If Jesus suffered, as the Scriptures declare, it must have been from the
mentality of others; since all suffering comes from mind, not from matter,
and there could be no sin or suffering in the Mind which is God. Not his
own sins, but the sins of the world, "crucified the Lord of glory," and
"put him to an open shame."

Holding a quickened sense of false environment, and suffering from
mentality in opposition to Truth, are significant of that state of mind
which the actual understanding of Christian Science first eliminates and
then destroys.

In the divine order of Science every follower of Christ shares his cup of
sorrows. He also suffereth in the flesh, and from the mentality which
opposes the law of Spirit; but the divine law is supreme, for it freeth him
from the law of sin and death.

Prophets and apostles suffered from the thoughts of others. Their conscious
being was not fully exempt from physicality and the sense of sin.

Until he awakes from his delusion, he suffers least from sin who is a
hardened sinner. The hypocrite's affections must first be made to fret in
their chains; and the pangs of hell must lay hold of him ere he can change
from flesh to Spirit, become acquainted with that Love which is without
dissimulation and endureth all things. Such mental conditions as
ingratitude, lust, malice, hate, constitute the miasma of earth. More
obnoxious than Chinese stenchpots are these dispositions which offend the
spiritual sense.

Anatomically considered, the design of the material senses is to warn
mortals of the approach of danger by the pain they feel and occasion; but
as this sense disappears it foresees the impending doom and foretells the
pain. Man's refuge is in spirituality, "under the shadow of the Almighty."

The cross is the central emblem of human history. Without it there is
neither temptation nor glory. When Jesus turned and said, "Who hath touched
me?" he must have felt the influence of the woman's thought; for it is
written that he felt that "virtue had gone out of him." His pure
consciousness was discriminating, and rendered this infallible verdict; but
he neither held her error by affinity nor by infirmity, for it was detected
and dismissed.

This gospel of suffering brought life and bliss. This is earth's Bethel in
stone,--its pillow, supporting the ladder which reaches heaven.

Suffering was the confirmation of Paul's faith. Through "a thorn in the
flesh" he learned that spiritual grace was sufficient for him.

Peter rejoiced that he was found worthy to suffer for Christ; because to
suffer with him is to reign with him.

Sorrow is the harbinger of joy. Mortal throes of anguish forward the birth
of immortal being; but divine Science wipes away all tears.

The only conscious existence in the flesh is error of some sort,--sin,
pain, death,--a false sense of life and happiness. Mortals, if at ease in
so-called existence, are in their native element of error, and must become
_dis-eased_, dis-quieted, before error is annihilated.

Jesus walked with bleeding feet the thorny earth-road, treading "the
winepress alone." His persecutors said mockingly, "Save thyself, and come
down from the cross." This was the very thing he _was_ doing, coming down
from the cross, saving himself after the manner that he had taught, by the
law of Spirit's supremacy; and this was done through what is humanly called
_agony_.

Even the ice-bound hypocrite melts in fervent heat, before he apprehends
Christ as "the way." The Master's sublime triumph over all mortal mentality
was immortality's goal. He was too wise not to be willing to test the full
compass of human woe, being "in all points tempted like as we are, yet
without sin."

Thus the absolute unreality of sin, sickness, and death was revealed,--a
revelation that beams on mortal sense as the midnight sun shines over the
Polar Sea.




The Saviour's Mission


If there is no reality in evil, why did the Messiah come to the world, and
from what evils was it his purpose to save humankind? How, indeed, is he a
Saviour, if the evils from which he saves are nonentities?

Jesus came to earth; but the Christ (that is, the divine idea of the divine
Principle which made heaven and earth) was never absent from the earth and
heaven; hence the phraseology of Jesus, who spoke of the Christ as one who
came down from heaven, yet as "the Son of man _which is in heaven_." (John
iii. 13.) By this we understand Christ to be the divine idea brought to the
flesh in the son of Mary.

Salvation is as eternal as God. To mortal thought Jesus appeared as a
child, and grew to manhood, to suffer before Pilate and on Calvary, because
he could reach and teach mankind only through this conformity to mortal
conditions; but Soul never saw the Saviour come and go, because the divine
idea is always present.

Jesus came to rescue men from these very illusions to which he seemed to
conform: from the illusion which calls sin real, and man a sinner, needing
a Saviour; the illusion which calls sickness real, and man an invalid,
needing a physician; the illusion that death is as real as Life. From such
thoughts--mortal inventions, one and all--Christ Jesus came to save men,
through ever-present and eternal good.

Mortal man is a kingdom divided against itself. With the same breath he
articulates truth and error. We say that God is All, and there is none
beside Him, and then talk of sin and sinners as real. We call God
omnipotent and omnipresent, and then conjure up, from the dark abyss of
nothingness, a powerful presence named _evil_. We say that harmony is real,
and inharmony is its opposite, and therefore unreal; yet we descant upon
sickness, sin, and death as realities.

With the tongue "bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men,
who are made after the similitude [human concept] of God. Out of the same
mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not
so to be." (James iii. 9, 10.) Mortals are free moral agents, to choose
whom they would serve. If God, then let them serve Him, and He will be unto
them All-in-all.

If God is ever present, He is neither absent from Himself nor from the
universe. Without Him, the universe would disappear, and space, substance,
and immortality be lost. St. Paul says, "And if Christ be not raised, your
faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins." (1 Corinthians xv. 17.) Christ
cannot come to mortal and material sense, which sees not God. This false
sense of substance must yield to His eternal presence, and so dissolve.
Rising above the false, to the true evidence of Life, is the resurrection
that takes hold of eternal Truth. Coming and going belong to mortal
consciousness. God is "the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever."

To material sense, Jesus first appeared as a helpless human babe; but to
immortal and spiritual vision he was one with the Father, even the eternal
idea of God, that was--and is--neither young nor old, neither dead nor
risen. The mutations of mortal sense are the evening and the morning of
human thought,--the twilight and dawn of earthly vision, which precedeth
the nightless radiance of divine Life. Human perception, advancing toward
the apprehension of its nothingness, halts, retreats, and again goes
forward; but the divine Principle and Spirit and spiritual man are
unchangeable,--neither advancing, retreating, nor halting.

Our highest sense of infinite good in this mortal sphere is but the sign
and symbol, not the substance of good. Only faith and a feeble
understanding make the earthly acme of human sense. "The life which I now
live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God." (Galatians ii.
20.)

Christian Science is both demonstration and fruition, but how attenuated
are our demonstration and realization of this Science! Truth, in divine
Science, is the stepping-stone to the understanding of God; but the broken
and contrite heart soonest discerns this truth, even as the helpless sick
are soonest healed by it. Invalids say, "I have recovered from sickness;"
when the fact really remains, in divine Science, that they never were sick.

The Christian saith, "Christ (God) died for me, and came to save me;" yet
God dies not, and is the ever-presence that neither comes nor goes, and man
is forever His image and likeness. "The things which are seen are temporal;
but the things which are not seen are eternal." (2 Corinthians iv. 18.)
This is the mystery of godliness--that God, good, is never absent, and
there is none beside good. Mortals can understand this only as they reach
the Life of good, and learn that there is no Life in evil. Then shall it
appear that the true ideal of omnipotent and ever-present good is an ideal
wherein and wherefor there is no evil. Sin exists only as a sense, and not
as Soul. Destroy this sense of sin, and sin disappears. Sickness, sin, or
death is a false sense of Life and good. Destroy this trinity of error, and
you find Truth.

In Science, Christ never died. In material sense Jesus died, and lived. The
fleshly Jesus seemed to die, though he did not. The Truth or Life in divine
Science--undisturbed by human error, sin, and death--saith forever, "I am
the living God, and man is My idea, never in matter, nor resurrected from
it." "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen."
(Luke xxiv. 5, 6.) Mortal sense, confining itself to matter, is all that
can be buried or resurrected.

Mary had risen to discern faintly God's ever-presence, and that of His
idea, man; but her mortal sense, reversing Science and spiritual
understanding, interpreted this appearing as a risen Christ. The I
AM was neither buried nor resurrected. The Way, the Truth, and the
Life were never absent for a moment. This trinity of Love lives and reigns
forever. Its kingdom, not apparent to material sense, never disappeared to
spiritual sense, but remained forever in the Science of being. The
so-called appearing, disappearing, and reappearing of ever-presence, in
whom is no variableness or shadow of turning, is the false human sense of
that light which shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it
not.




Summary


All that _is_, God created. If sin has any pretense of existence, God is
responsible therefor; but there is no reality in sin, for God can no more
behold it, or acknowledge it, than the sun can coexist with darkness.

To build the individual spiritual sense, conscious of only health,
holiness, and heaven, on the foundations of an eternal Mind which is
conscious of sickness, sin, and death, is a moral impossibility; for "other
foundation can no man lay than that is laid." (1 Corinthians iii. 11.) The
nearer we approximate to such a Mind, even if it were (or could be) God,
the more real those mind-pictures would become to us; until the hope of
ever eluding their dread presence must yield to despair, and the haunting
sense of evil forever accompany our being.

Mortals may climb the smooth glaciers, leap the dark fissures, scale the
treacherous ice, and stand on the summit of Mont Blanc; but they can never
turn back what Deity knoweth, nor escape from identification with what
dwelleth in the eternal Mind.







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