Science & Health - Key to the Scriptures. Mary Baker Eddy

into belief in material origins, and away from the One Mind and true source, — I have no doubt the impressions of Truth were as distinct as sound, and came thus to the senses of primitive Christians. They talked with God. The medium of hearing being spiritual, it is normal and indestructible.

      If Enoch's perception had been confined to the evidence before his material senses, he could never have walked with God, and been guided into prophecy and demonstration by Divine Science.

      Spiritual sense is a conscious capacity to understand God. It unfolds to human comprehension its faith by works, more than by words. Its words are expressed only in “new tongues.” This involves the translation of matter back to the spiritual and original text, where the Principle and proof of Christianity are set forth in Jesus' demonstration, healing the sick, casting out error, and destroying death, — “the last enemy to he overcome.”

      The suicidal sinner regards death as a friend, as a stepping-stone to immortality and bliss. The Bible calls it an enemy; and Jesus overcame death, instead of yielding to it. To him, therefore, it was not the threshold over which he must pass to Life and glory.

      Mortal mind has a modus of its own, undirected and unsustained by God. It brings a rose into contact with the olfactory nerves, that they may smell it. In common methods it handles the rose. In the uncommon methods, it employs legerdemain, or rises, in credulous frenzy, to the belief that spirits unseen handle the flower for mortals.

      Because all the methods of Mind are not understood, we say the lips must move in order to convey thought, that the undulations of the air convey sound, and that any other method must involve a miracle. The realities of being, its normal action and the origin of all things, are unseen to mortal sense; whereas the unreal and imitative movements of finite belief (that reverse the infinite modus and action) are self-styled the real. Whoever contradicts that supposition is called a deceiver, or said to be deceived. “As a man thinketh, so is he” in error; but as a man understandeth, so is he in Truth.

      The supposed sensations of the body must either be the sensations of mind or of matter. Which are they? Is it not self-evident that matter has no sensation; and is it not equally self-evident that matter exists in belief only, and not in the understanding of being?

      The sensation exists only in belief. When a tear starts for another's sorrow, has not mortal mind produced the effect seen in the lachrymal gland? Was it grief that caused the tear, or the effect of one mortal mind upon another? We cite such a case to show the common notion of cause and effect, not as asserting that a belief in such an action of the mind, distressing others, is scientific. It should no longer be said in Israel that “the parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.” Sympathy with error should disappear. One erring mind, transferring its thoughts to another, only serves to prolong the discord and illusion that ought to be short-lived.

      The transmission of disease, or certain idiosyncrasies, would be impossible if this great fact of Life were learned: namely, that nothing inharmonious can enter it, for Life is God. Heredity is a prolific subject for belief to pin itself upon, but if nothing is real but the right, we can have no dangerous inheritances, and away go the ills of flesh.

      John Young, of Edinburgh, writes, “God is the father of Mind, and of nothing else.” This is “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” of human beliefs, and preparing the way of Science. Let us learn of the real and eternal, and prepare for the reign of Spirit, the kingdom of heaven, — the reign and rule of universal harmony, that cannot be lost, or remain forever unseen.

      Already the shadow of His right hand rests upon the hour. Ye who can discern the face of the sky, — the sign material, — how much more should you discern the sign mental, compass the severance of sin and sickness from the thoughts that produce them, and understand the Truth that corrects and destroys them. To cut down all that beareth not good fruit was the mission of our Master, and his mission was to the very hearts that rejected him.

      Judaism, enjoining the limited form of a national religion, was the antithesis of Christianity. It was merely a finite and material scheme, carried out in speculative theories regarding God, man, sanitary methods, and religious means. The Jewish recognition of God, as only a person and king, has not yet departed. Creeds and rituals have not quite washed their hands of rabbinical lore. To-day echoes the cry of bygone centuries, “Crucify him! Pursue Truth at every advancing footstep, with sword and spear!” “He maketh himself as God,” was the Jewish accusation against him who planted Christianity on the foundation of Spirit, and would know no other Life, Intelligence, or Substance except God.

      All forms of error support the false conclusion that there is more than one Intelligence; that material history is as real and important as spiritual history; that mortal belief is as conclusively Mind as immortal Truth: that there are two separate antagonistic entities and beings, two powers, — namely, Spirit and matter, — resulting in a third person (mortal man), who carries out the delusions of sin, sickness, and death.

      The first power is admitted to be good, an Intelligence named God. The second power, evil, is the opposite of good. It cannot be Intelligence, though thus named. The third, man, is a supposed mixture of the first and second powers, of Intelligence and non-intelligence, of Spirit and matter.

      Such theories are self-evidently erroneous. They can never stand the test of Science. Judging them by their fruits, they are corrupt. When will the ages under stand the Ego, and see only one God?

      This incoherent mass of self-assertion gave sinners the notion that they could create what God cannot, — namely, sinful mortality, — usurping the name without the nature of Mind. In Science it can never be said by any mortal, “I have a mind of my own, regardless of God.”

      A distinguished clergyman writes, in his sermon on The Great Purpose of Christianity: “The highest existence in the universe is Mind, for God is Mind; and the development of that Principle which assimilates us to God must be our supreme good. . . . He imparts, as it were, Himself. . . . We all possess within us what is of more worth than the external creation. For this outward system is the product of Mind.”

      In the same vein, slightly changing its wording, is Bowring's stanza: —

      We see Thy hand; it leads us, it supports us;

       We hear Thy voice; it counsels and it courts us;

       And then we turn away; and still Thy kindness

       Informs our blindness.

      It has been said, and truly, that Christianity must be Science, and Science must be Christianity; else one or the other is false and useless; but neither of those is unimportant or untrue, and they are alike in demonstration. If God is within and without all things, what and where is matter, which does not express Spirit?

      When you say “Man's body is matter,” I say with Paul, “Be willing rather to be absent from the body, and present with the Lord.” Yield your belief of Mind in matter, and have but one Mind, even God.

      Medicine may inform you that Paul's Christianity, that regards Mind scientifically as separate from matter, indicates an unnatural state, or catalepsy; and it may further instruct you as to the dangerous nature of this disorder, telling you how it ends in death. But turn to the inspired writers and you read: “If a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death;” “Henceforth know we no man after the flesh.”

      We must destroy the belief that Life and Intelligence are in matter, and plant ourselves upon what is pure and perfect. Paul said, “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.” Sooner or later we shall learn that the fetters of man's finite, capacity are forged by the illusion that he lives in body instead of Soul, in matter rather than Spirit.

      The possession of but one God, one Mind, unfolds the divine law of loving thy neighbor as thyself. Selfishness hinders man's natural drift towards God, and conveys thought in selfish channels, where opposite and contending interests sway mankind. It tips the beam of being to the side of error, instead of Truth. This throws our weight into the scale of matter instead of Spirit.

      In the scientific relation of God to man we find that one man's meat is not another's