Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Mary Baker Eddy

from a higher standpoint, one progresses spontaneously, even as light emits light without effort; for “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Distrust of one's ability to gain the good desired, and bring out better and higher results, often hampers the trial of one's wings, and ensures defeat at the outset.

      A scientific view of progress admits the possibility of every good achievement, and first sets about discovering what God has already done for us.

      Our mortal beliefs defraud us. They make man an involuntary creator, — producing evil when he would create good, forming deformity when he would outline grace and beauty, injuring those he would bless. He becomes a general mis-creator, whose “touch turns hope to dust.” He might say in Bible language, “The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

      The senses say that man's birth is sometimes untimely, and his death lamentable; that weeds grow apace, and choke the flowers not already scorched by the sun, or nipped by untimely frosts. Such are not the facts of God's creation. The Truth of things is perennial, and the error is seen only as we look from wrong points of observation.

      Mortals are egotists. They fancy themselves independent workers, personal authors, and even privileged originators of something that Deity would not or could not create.

      The foundation of mortal discord is a false sense of man's origin. To begin rightly is to end rightly. Every calculation that starts from the body, starts wrongly. Immortal Mind is the only Cause and impersonal Principle. Cause does not exist in matter, in mortal mind, or in personality.

      Because we look to the body for pleasure, we find pain. For Life, we find death; for Truth, we find error; and for Spirit, its opposite, called matter. Now reverse this action. Look away from the body, into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality. Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, good and true, and you will bring these into your experience, proportionately to their occupancy of your thoughts.

      Detach the sense from the body, or matter, only attached to it through human belief, and you may learn the meaning of God, or good, and the nature of the immutable and immortal. Breaking away from the mutations of time and sense, you will neither lose the solid objects and ends of Life, nor your own identity. Fixing the gaze on the arch of heaven, you may fly as the bird flies, that has burst from the egg and preened its wings for a skyward flight. In this line of thought is Sir John Bowring's translation from the Russian: —

      Though but an atom midst immensity,

       Still I am something, fashioned by Thy hand.

       I hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth,

       On the last verge of mortal being stand. —

       Close to the realm where angels have their birth,

       Just on the boundaries of the Spirit-land!

      Life and blessedness are the only proofs of existence, whereby you can recognize it. The scientific sense of being, forsaking matter for Spirit, by no means suggests man's absorption into Deity, and the loss of his own identity, but confers upon him an enlarged individuality, a wider sphere of thought and action, a more expansive benevolence, a higher and more permanent being.

      We should forget our bodies, in remembering God and the human race. Good demands of man every hour, wherein to work out the problem of being. Consecration to God lessens not man's dependence on Him, but heightens it. Neither does it diminish his obligations to God, but shows the paramount necessity of meeting them. Science takes naught from the perfection of God, but ascribes to Him the greater glory.

      When man resigns his claims as a creator, blends his thoughts of existence with those of his Maker, and works only as He works, man will no longer grope darkly, and cling to earth because he has not tasted heaven Longfellow was thus thinking when he wrote: —

      And the feeble hands and helpless,

       Groping blindly in the darkness,

       Touch God's right hand in that darkness,

       And are lifted up and strengthened.

      “Putting off the old man” and his deeds, mortals thereby “put on immortality.”

      Who that has felt the loss of physical pleasure, has not gained stronger desires for impersonal joy? The aspiration after these comes even before we find what belongs to Wisdom and Love. The loss of earthly hopes and joys has brightened the ascending plane of many a heart. The pains of sense quickly inform us that its pleasures are mortal, and that joy is spiritual.

      The sinner believes himself happier for wrong-doing, and the saint that he suffers for doing right. Both inferences are false. They are the cobweb conceptions of material sense, — transient forms of error flitting before mortals, only to sink into rapid oblivion.

      Would existence be to you a blank without personal friends? Then the time cometh when you will be solitary, left without sympathy and alone; for this vacuum is to be filled with God, spiritual Truth, and Love, impersonal instead of personal Good. When this hour of development comes, even if you cling to a sense of material joys, Divine Love will force you to accept what best promotes your growth. Friends will betray, and personal enemies will encompass you; but the lesson will be sufficient, for “man's extremity is God's opportunity.” Thus He teaches mortals to lay down their personal treasures, in order to gain the Principle of right, and thus learn the divine way in Science.

      The pains of sense are salutary, if they wrench away the pleasurable beliefs of sense, and transplant the affections from sense to Soul, where the creations of God “are good, rejoicing the heart.” Such are the footprints in Science, whereby Truth decapitates error, and mortals gain a higher individuality and destiny with every succeeding step.

      Man must follow Jesus' sayings and demonstration, up to the very throne of perfect and eternal Mind. Thus the beliefs of matter will disappear, and the ideas of Spirit will crowd upon us with their beatific presence, flooding humanity with light.

      Spiritual understanding lifts man above mortal frailty, as he crosses the barriers of time, into the vast forever of Life. Only that which co-exists with God can reflect Him and be His idea. Every object in the material universe will be resolved into thought, whose substance is Mind, not matter, and is included in the generic term man, of which woman is the highest species.

      The late Louis Agassiz, by his microscopic examinations of a vulture's ovum, strengthened my conclusions as to the scientific theory of creation. Mortal belief claims to create, but the immortal idea alone represents the Truth of creation. Man is more than an individual form, with a mind inside of it. He reflects Infinity, and includes in this reflection the entire universe of God's creating. Professor Agassiz was able to see in the egg the earth's atmosphere, the gathering clouds, the moon and stars, while the germinating speck of embryotic life seemed a small sun.

      Mortal mind, examined through the microscope of metaphysics, presents more hues than are to be easily detected upon its surface, — colors borrowed from many mental sources; but finally every tint must disappear in the dazzling effulgence of supernal sunlight, where the robes of Spirit are “white and glistering,” like the raiment of Christ.

      Even in this world, therefore, “let your garments be always white.”