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

cease when the freedom and God-given dominion of man are appropriated. Mortals will some day assert their freedom in the name of Almighty God. Then they will control their own bodies, apprehending Divine Science. Dropping their beliefs, they will behold harmony as the divine reality, and discord as the material unreality.

      The evidence of the senses reverses the Science of Being, and establishes a reign of discord, — the power of sin, sickness, and death; but the great facts of Life, rightly understood, will defeat this trio of errors, with all their false witnesses, and reveal the kingdom of heaven, the reign of harmony to come on earth.

      The earth's diurnal rotation is invisible to personal sense, and the sun seems moving from east to west. Until this false testimony of the senses is rebuked by study, it deludes the judgment and offers false evidence.

      Science, reversing appearances, corrects them by the simple rule that the greater controls the lesser. The sun is the central stillness, and the earth, turning on its axis, revolves around it. Astronomical order, imitating the action of Principle and its reflection, is nearer the spiritual fact; and it is allied to Divine Science in its method of governing man and the universe.

      Mind, supreme over all its formations and governing them all, is the central sun to its own systems of ideas, the Light and Life of all its own vast creation. Man is tributary to the Divine Mind. The mortal body is not the man, and is subject to the control of error.

      The optical focus is proof of the illusion of material sense. On the eye's retina sky and tree-tops apparently join hands, clouds and ocean meet and mingle. Where the finite and material drop the view, the infinite and spiritual extend and enlarge it.

      The barometer, that little prophet of storm and sunshine, — denying the testimony of the senses, — points to fair weather in the midst of murky clouds and drenching rain.

      To material sense the severance of the jugular vein takes away Life; but to spiritual sense, and in Science, Life goes on unchanged, being eternal. Temporal life is a false sense of existence. Science takes all evidence out of the hands of matter, and supports the substance of Spirit and the spiritual fact.

      Science destroyed Ptolemy's purblind theory, that the earth is the astronomic centre, and revealed the true plan of the harmony of the spheres. Material sense, reversing the Science of Soul, would make mortal mind tributary to mortal body, and appoint certain sections of matter, such as brain, and nerves, as seats of pain and pleasure, whence matter reports to this mind its status of happiness or misery.

      Our theories make the same mistake regarding Soul and body that Ptolemy made as to the solar system. They insist that Soul is in body, and Mind therefore tributary to matter. Science has destroyed the false theory as to the relations of the celestial bodies; and Science also will destroy the greater error as to our terrestrial bodies. The true idea and Principle of man will then appear.

      Copernicus mapped out the stellar system; but before he spake, astrography was chaotic, and the heavenly fields unexplored. The Chaldean wise men read in the stars the fate of empires and the fortunes of men. No higher revelation than the horoscope was to them displayed upon the empyrean, but earth and heaven were still bright, and bird and blossom were glad in the sunshine.

      We have goodness and beauty to gladden the heart; but man, left to the hypotheses of material sense, unexplained by Science, would be as the wandering comet or desolate star, — “a weary searcher for a viewless home.”

      The Ptolemaic blunder could not affect the harmony of being, as much as the error relating to Soul and body, — which reverses the order of Science, and assigns to matter the power and prerogative of Spirit, so that man becomes the most inharmonious body of the universe.

      The senses of Spirit are without pain and forever at peace. Nothing can hide from them the beauty of all things, the might and permanence of Truth. What a transient support is mortal joy, when the power of light and lens may end with a wound on the retina! But mortals can never lose the sight or sense of what is real.

      The Spirit's eye need not be subordinate to geometric altitudes. Whatever is governed by God is never for an instant deprived of the light and might of Intelligence and Life.

      We should never inquire into bodily condition, structure, or economy, if we followed the command of our Master, “Take no thought for the body;” but we should be masters of the body, dictate terms to it, and form and control it with Truth.

      The compounded minerals, or aggregate substances that compose the earth, the relations constituent masses hold to each other, the magnitudes, distances, and revolutions of the celestial bodies, are of no real importance when we remember they must all give place to the spiritual fact, by the translation of man and the universe from matter back to Spirit. Proportionately as this is done, will both man and the universe be found harmonious and eternal.

      Material substances, geological calculations, all the paraphernalia of speculative theories (based on the hypothesis of Life and Intelligence located in matter) will ultimately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite calculus of Spirit.

      There is but one way to heaven, — harmony, — and Jesus showed us this way. Know no other reality than God and His reflection, no other consciousness of Life's demands, and rise superior to sin, sickness, and death — the so-called pains or pleasures of matter.

      The notion of getting to heaven through the death of the body that never had Life, is to fancy that a second error will remedy the first; and that the illusion that Life is in matter may be cancelled by another illusion, that death takes Life out of matter. Spirit evolves all that is real. Form, outline, and color are ideas that Mind has expressed, and they never leave their spiritual and immortal basis for one transient and material.

      When Columbus gave freer breath to the globe, ignorance and superstition chained the honest limbs of the brave old navigator, and disgrace and starvation stared him in the face; but sterner still had been his fate, if that discovery had undermined the favorite inclinations of sensualism.

      Neither age nor accident interferes with the senses of Soul, and there are no other real senses. It is self-evident that body has neither sense nor sensation of its own, that there is no oblivion of Soul or its faculties. Is Soul lost through sin? Then being and immortality are lost, with the faculties of seeing and hearing. But being cannot be lost while man exists.

      Knowing that Soul and all its faculties are forever manifested through man, the Master healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, feet to the lame, bringing to light the action of the Eternal Mind on the erring mortal mind and body, to give a better understanding and harmony of being. He healed the sick and destroyed sin, by one and the same metaphysical process.

      If it be true that nerves have sensation, that the eyes see and the ears hear, that matter has intelligence, then, when the body is dematerialized, those faculties must depart, and are not immortal as Mind; whereas the fact remains, that only through dematerialization can these faculties be immortal.

      The material senses and Adam (represented in the Scriptures as formed from dust) are figurative and return to dust, to the nothingness of a belief disavowed. They go out as they came in, for they are still the error, and not the Truth of being. When the spiritual sense, and not the material, conveys the impressions of Mind to mortals, then being will be understood, and found to be harmonious.

      We bow down to matter, and entertain finite thoughts of God, even as does the pagan idolater. We fear and obey what we consider a material body, more than we do a spiritual God. Modern knowledge, like the original tree of knowledge, multiplies our pains. Our illusions would rob God and slay man; and then would spread their table with cannibal titbits, giving thanks meanwhile.

      Scripture informs us that “with God all things are possible;” but common theories practically deny this, and make healing the sick possible only through matter. Our theories may be false, but the Scripture is true. Christianity is not dishonest, but other religions may be.

      The attempts to conciliate society, and gain dominion over mankind, are weaknesses of the world. He that leaves all for Truth has left popularity and gained Christianity, but the material belief is slow to acknowledge what the spiritual fact includes.