of Truth, even when not wholly understood.
Mental Science was a new revelation to myself when, teaching its grand truths, I had (along with them) to impart also the hue of spiritual ideas from my own spiritual condition, and do this through the meagre channel afforded by language. The Truth makes a new creation, whereby old things pass away and “all things become new.” Passions, selfishness, appetites, — all sensuality, — yield to spirituality, and the superabundance of being is on the side of God. Christian perfection is won on no other basis. The scientific unity which exists between God and man must be wrought out in life-practice, and God's will be universally done.
If they would bring to bear upon the study of the Science of Mind half the faith they have in the so-called pains and pleasures of material sense, men would not go on from immorality to immorality, until disciplined by the prison and the scaffold, but the whole human family would be redeemed by the merits of Christ. For this glorious result Jesus strove, that man might be blessed by Divine knowing.
Outside of this Science all is unstable error; but, when in accord with the Principle of his being, man neither sins nor suffers. The days of our earthly pilgrimage should multiply instead of diminish; this travelling should be towards life instead of death; and as we journey, we should develop more and more the infinite capacities of humanity, which endow it with the supreme control of the earth.
Grafting holiness upon unholiness, and opining that sin is forgiven when it is not destroyed, is as foolish as straining out gnats and swallowing camels. Our beliefs about a Supreme Being, and the practice growing out of them, are contradictory. We admit that God hath almighty power, is a “present help in time of trouble,” and yet we rely on a drug to heal disease, as if senseless matter had more power than sensible Spirit.
Common opinion admits that a man may take cold in the act of doing good, that evil can trespass on Love's domain. The Science of Christianity endows Spirit with omnipotence, assigns rewards to righteousness, and denies that matter can create or destroy.
Error abounds where truth should much more abound. If God were understood, instead of merely believed, this faith would establish health. The accusation of the rabbis, “He maketh himself as God,” was the justification of Christ, for to the Christian there is no other self than God. This thought incites the more exalted worship of self-abnegation. Spiritual perception brings out the possibilities of being, and destroys reliance on aught but God, so making man the image of his Maker in deed and in Truth.
We are prone to believe either in more than one Supreme Ruler, or in some power less than God. We imagine that Mind can be imprisoned in a sensuous body. We try to believe, when the body (in God's keeping) has gone to ruin, overmastered omnipotence, and destroyed itself, that then the deathless Principle or Soul may escape from it.
But God has no need to kill a man in order to draw him to Himself, for God Himself is the Life. He is at once the centre and circumference of being. The good we think and do, the virtue we call manhood, — these qualities are real, and reflect God. It is the evil we do and say, the opposite of Life and Love, which is unreal. The notion that God lives in matter is pantheistic. God is not the author of an evil mind. Indeed, evil is not Mind. We are to learn that evil is the awful deception and unreality of being. Without this lesson we equally lose sight of the perfect Father and of the Divine Principle governing man.
Befogged in error (the error of believing that matter can be intelligent for good or evil) we can catch unbiassed glimpses of God only as the mists disperse, or as they melt into such thinness that we can perceive the divine image in some word or deed that indicates the true idea — the supremacy and reality of good, the nothingness and unreality of evil. The Scriptures say: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter; fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man” (the word duty not being in the Hebrew). Well does Myers sing: —
Therefore, O Lord, I will not fail or falter.
Nay, but I ask it, — nay, but I desire:
Lay on my lips Thine embers of the altar,
Seal with the sting and furnish with the fire.
The phrase mortal man is really a solecism, for man is immortal, and Truth pierces the error of mortals as a sunbeam penetrates the cloud. The error that saith “Soul is in body, Mind is in matter, and Good is in evil,” must unsay it, and cease such utterances; else God will be hidden from it, and man will sin without a sense of sin, leaning on matter instead of Spirit, limping with lameness, drooping with dyspepsia, consuming with disease, — all because of the blindness of this false sense of God and man.
We should hesitate to say Jehovah sins or suffers; but if sin and suffering are realities of being, whence did they come? Mind signifies God, — Infinity, not finity. How far removed from infidelity is the belief that can combine such opposites as holiness and unholiness, calling both Spirit, at the same time admitting that Spirit is God; virtually saying “He is good in one instance, and evil in another”? There are evil beliefs, called evil spirits, but they are not Spirit, or they could not be evil. Error of statement leads to error in action.
There is no evil in Spirit, and proportionately as we advance spiritually, evil disappears. This is the evidence of our position, for every scientific statement in Christianity, about God or man, has its proof.
The understanding that the Ego is Mind, and that there is but one Mind or Intelligence, begins at once to destroy the errors of mortal sense, and to supply the Truth of immortal sense, It makes the body harmonious, governed by Spirit instead of matter. It makes the nerves, the bones, the brains, to be servants instead of masters. If the body is governed by the higher law of Mind, its members are in submission to Life and Truth.
If brains, nerves, stomach, are intelligent, — if they talk to us, tell us how they are conditioned, and report how they feel, — then Spirit and matter commingle, and so do sickness and health, good and evil, Life and death; and who shall say which is the greater?
If the decision were left to the personal senses, evil would appear to be the master of good, sickness to be the rule of existence; while health would seem the exception, death the inevitable, and Life the supposition. Paul asked (2 Cor. vi. 15) “What fellowship hath Christ with Belial?” Remember, — Truth is greater than error, and we cannot put the greater into the lesser. Soul is greater than body; but if it were in the body, it would be less, and therefore could not be Spirit.
Man, governed by his Maker, having no other God, may triumph over sin, sickness, and death, and plant himself on the apostolic statement that “all things were made by him (the Word of God), and without him was not anything made that was made.”
If God made sin, if Good produced evil, and Truth resulted in error, Science would be helpless; but because God is not the author of these human discords, we may accept the conclusion that they have only a fabulous existence, and are of human instead of divine origin.
To hold yourself superior to sin — because God made you superior to it, and governs man — is wisdom. To fear sin is to misunderstand the Divine Science of Being and man's relation to God, to doubt His government, and distrust His omnipotent care. To hold yourself superior to sickness and death is equally wise, and in accordance with Divine Science ; and to fear them is impossible, when you understand God, and know that they are no part of His creation.
If you fully understood the relation you hold to God you could have no other Mind but His, — no other Love, Wisdom, and Truth, no other sense of Life, and no consciousness of matter or error.
If thought is startled at the strong claim of Science for the supremacy of good, and doubts it, ought we not, contrariwise, to be astounded at the vigorous claims of evil, and doubt them, — no longer thinking it natural to sin, and unnatural to forsake it, no longer imagining evil to be the real, and good the unreal? Truth should not seem as surprising and unnatural as error, and error should not seem as real as Truth. There is no error in Science, and our lives must be governed by Science in order to be in harmony with God, the Principle of all being.
Sound is a mental impression, made on human belief; the ear hears not. In Science sound is communicated through spiritual understanding, through the senses of Soul.