Chapter 2

This infinite logic is the infinite light,--uncomprehended, yet forever giving forth more light, because it has no darkness to emit. Mortals do not understand the All; hence their inference of some other existence beside God and His true likeness,--of something unlike Him. He who is All, understands all. He can have no knowledge or inference but His own consciousness, and can take in no more than all.

The mists of matter--sin, sickness, and death--disappear in proportion as mortals approach Spirit, which is the reality of being. It is not enough to say that matter is the substratum of evil, and that its highest attenuation is mortal mind; for there is, strictly speaking, _no_ mortal mind. Mind is immortal. Death is the consequent of an antecedent false assumption of the realness of something unreal, material, and mortal. If God knows the antecedent, He must produce its consequences. From this logic there is no escape. Matter, or evil, is the absence of Spirit or good. Their nothingness is thus proven; for God is good, ever-present, and All.

"In Him we live, and move, and have our being;" consequently it is impossible for the true man--who is a spiritual and individual being, created in the eternal Science of being--to be conscious of aught but good. God's image and likeness can never be less than a good man; and for man to be more than God's likeness is impossible. Man is the climax of creation; and God is not without an ever-present witness, testifying of Himself. Matter, or any mode of mortal mind, is neither part nor parcel of divine consciousness and God's verity.

In Science there is no fallen state of being; for therein is no inverted image of God, no escape from the focal radiation of the infinite. Hence the unreality of error, and the truth of the Scripture, that there is "none beside Him." If mortals could grasp these two words _all_ and _nothing_, this mystery of a God who has no knowledge of sin would disappear, and the eternal, infinite harmony would be fathomed. If God could know a false claim, false knowledge would be a part of His consciousness. Then evil would be as real as good, sickness as real as health, death as real as Life; and sickness, sin, and death would be as eternal as God.

IS CHRISTIAN SCIENCE BLASPHEMOUS?

Blasphemy has never diminished sin and sickness, nor acknowledged God in all His ways. Blasphemy rebukes not the godless lie that denies Him as All-in-all, nor does it ascribe to Him all presence, power, and glory. Christian Science does this. If Science lacked the proof of its origin in God, it would be self-destructive, for it rests alone on the demonstration of God's supremacy and omnipotence. Right thinking and right acting, physical and moral harmony, come with Science, and the secret of its presence lies in the universal need of better health and morals.

Human theories, when weighed in the balance, are found unequal to the demonstration of divine Life and Love; and their highest endeavors are, to divine Science, what a child's love of pictures is to art. A child, in his ignorance, may imagine the face of Dante to be the rapt face of Jesus. Thus falsely may the human conceive of the Divine. If the schoolmaster is not Christ, the school gets things wrong, and knows it not; but the teacher is morally responsible.

Good health and a more spiritual religion are the common wants; and these wants have wrought this moral result,--that the so-called mortal mind asks for what Mind alone can supply. This demand militates against the so-called demands of matter, and regulates the present high premium on Mind-healing. If the uniform moral and spiritual, as well as physical, effects of Christian Science were lacking, the premium would go down. That it continues to rise, and the demand to increase, shows its real value to the race. Even doctors will agree that infidelity, ignorance, and quackery have never met the growing wants of humanity. Christian Science is no "Boston craze;" it is the sober second thought of advancing humanity.

IS THERE A PERSONAL DEITY?

God is infinite. He is neither a limited mind nor a limited body. God is Love; and Love is Principle, not person. What the person of the infinite is, we know not; but we are gratefully and lovingly conscious of the fatherliness of this Supreme Being. God is individual, and man is His individualized idea. While material man and the physical senses receive no spiritual idea, and feel no sensation of divine Love, spiritual man and his spiritual senses are drinking in the nature and essence of the individual infinite. A sinful sense is incompetent to understand the realities of being,--that Life is God, and that man is in His image and likeness. A sinner can take no cognizance of the noumenon or the phenomena of Spirit; but leaving sin, sense rises to the fulness of the stature of man in Christ.

Person is formed after the manner of mortal man, so far as he can conceive of personality. Limitless personality is inconceivable. His person and perfection are neither self-created, nor discerned through imperfection; and of God as a person, human reason, imagination, and revelation give us no knowledge. Error would fashion Deity in a manlike mould, while Truth is moulding a Godlike man.

When the term divine Principle is used to signify Deity it may seem distant or cold, until better apprehended. This Principle is Mind, substance, Life, Truth, Love. When understood, Principle is found to be the only term that fully conveys the ideas of God,--one Mind, a perfect man, and divine Science. As the divine Principle is comprehended, God's omnipotence and omnipresence will dawn on mortals, and the notion of an everywhere-present body--or of an infinite Mind starting from a finite body, and returning to it--will disappear.

Ever-present Love must seem ever absent to ever-present selfishness or material sense. Hence this asking amiss and receiving not, and the common idolatry of man-worship. In divine Science, God is recognized as the only power, presence, and glory.

Adam's mistiness and Satan's reasoning, ever since the flood,--when specimens of every kind emerged from the ark,--have run through the veins of all human philosophy. Human reason is a blind guide, a continued series of mortal hypotheses, antagonistic to Revelation and Science. It is continually straying into forbidden by-paths of sensualism, contrary to the life and teachings of Jesus and Paul, and the vision of the Apocalypse. Human philosophy has ninety-nine parts of error to the one-hundredth part of Truth,--an unsafe decoction for the race. The Science that Jesus demonstrated, whose views of Truth Confucius and Plato but dimly discerned, Science and Health interprets. It was not a search after wisdom; it was wisdom, and it grasped in spiritual law the universe,--all time, space, immortality, thought, extension. This Science demonstrated the Principle of all phenomena, identity, individuality, law; and showed man as reflecting God and the divine capacity. Human philosophy would dethrone perfection, and substitute matter and evil for divine means and ends.

Human philosophy has an undeveloped God, who unfolds Himself through material modes, wherein the human and divine mingle in the same realm and consciousness. This is rank infidelity; because by it we lose God's ways and perpetuate the supposed power and reality of evil _ad infinitum_. Christian Science rends this veil in the pantheon of many gods, and reproduces the teachings of Jesus, whose philosophy is incontestable, bears the strain of time, and brings in the glories of eternity; "for other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ."

Divine philosophy is demonstrably the true idea of the Christ, wherein Principle heals and saves. A philosophy which cannot heal the sick has little resemblance to Science, and is, to say the least, like a cloud without rain, "driven about by every wind of doctrine." Such philosophy has certainly not touched the hem of the Christ garment.

Leibnitz, Descartes, Fichte, Hegel, Spinoza, Bishop Berkeley, were once clothed with a "brief authority;" but Berkeley ended his metaphysical theory with a treatise on the healing properties of tar-water, and Hegel was an inveterate snuff-taker. The circumlocution and cold categories of Kant fail to improve the conditions of mortals, morally, spiritually, or physically. Such miscalled metaphysical systems are reeds shaken by the wind. Compared with the inspired wisdom and infinite meaning of the Word of Truth, they are as moonbeams to the sun, or as Stygian night to the kindling dawn.

IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL?

No man hath seen the person of good or of evil. Each is greater than the corporeality we behold.

"He cast out _devils_." This record shows that the term devil is generic, being used in the plural number. From this it follows that there is more than one devil. That Jesus cast several persons out of another person, is not stated, and is impossible. Hence the passage must refer to the _evils_ which were cast out.

Jesus defined devil as a mortal who is full of evil. "Have I not chosen you twelve, and one of you _is a devil_?" His definition of evil indicated his ability to cast it out. An incorrect concept of the nature of evil hinders the destruction of evil. To conceive of God as resembling--in personality, or form--the personality that Jesus condemned as devilish, is fraught with spiritual danger. Evil can neither grasp the prerogative of God nor make evil omnipotent and omnipresent.

Jesus said to Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan;" but he to whom our Lord gave the keys of the kingdom could not have been wholly evil, and therefore was not a _devil_, after the accepted definition. Out of the Magdalen, Jesus cast seven devils; but not one person was named among them. According to Crabtre, these devils were the diseases Jesus cast out.

The most eminent divines, in Europe and America, concede that the Scriptures have both a literal and a moral meaning. Which of the two is the more important to gain,--the literal or the moral sense of the word _devil_,--in order to cast out this devil? Evil is a quality, not an individual.

As mortals, we need to discern the claims of evil, and to fight these claims, not as realities, but as illusions; but Deity can have no such warfare against Himself. Knowledge of a man's physical personality is not sufficient to inform us as to the amount of good or evil he possesses. Hence we cannot understand God or man, through the person of either. God is All-in-all; but He is definite and individual, the omnipresent and omniscient Mind; and man's individuality is God's own image and likeness,--even the immeasurable idea of divine Mind. In the Science of good, evil loses all place, person, and power.

According to Spinoza's philosophy God is amplification. He is in all things, and therefore He is in evil in human thought. He is extension, of whatever character. Also, according to Spinoza, man is an animal vegetable, developed through the lower orders of matter and mortal mind. All these vagaries are at variance with my system of metaphysics, which rests on God as One and All, and denies the actual existence of both matter and evil. According to false philosophy and scholastic theology, God is three persons in one person. By the same token, evil is not only as real as good, but much more real, since evil subordinates good in personality.

The claims of evil become both less and more in Christian Science, than in human philosophies or creeds: _more_, because the evil that is hidden by dogma and human reason is uncovered by Science; and _less_, because evil, being thus uncovered, is found out, and exposure is nine points of destruction. Then appears the grand verity of Christian Science: namely, that evil has no claims and was never a claimant; for behold evil (or devil) is, as Jesus said, "a murderer from the beginning, and the truth abode not in him."

There was never a moment in which evil was real. This great fact concerning all error brings with it another and more glorious truth, that good is supreme. As there is none beside Him, and He is all good, there can be no evil. Simply uttering this great thought is not enough! We must live it, until God becomes the All and Only of our being. Having won through great tribulation this cardinal point of divine Science, St. Paul said, "But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter."

IS MAN A PERSON?

Man is more than physical personality, or what we cognize through the material senses. Mind is more than matter, even as the infinite idea of Truth is beyond a finite belief. Man outlives finite mortal definitions of himself, according to a law of "the survival of the fittest." Man is the eternal idea of his divine Principle, or Father. He is neither matter nor a mode of mortal mind, for he is spiritual and eternal, an immortal mode of the divine Mind. Man is the image and likeness of God, coexistent and coeternal with Him.

Man is not absorbed in Deity; for he is forever individual; but what this everlasting individuality is, remains to be learned. Mortals have not seen it. That which is born of the flesh is not man's eternal identity. Spiritual and immortal man alone is God's likeness, and that which is mortal is not man in a spiritually scientific sense. A material, sinful mortal is but the counterfeit of immortal man.

The mind-quacks believe that mortal man is identical with immortal man, and that the immortal is inside the mortal; that good and evil blend; that matter and Spirit are one; and that Soul, or Spirit, is subdivided into spirits, or souls,--_alias_ gods. This infantile talk about Mind-healing is no more identical with Christian Science than the babe is identical with the adult, or the human belief resembles the divine idea. Hence it is impossible for those holding such material and mortal views to demonstrate my metaphysics. Theirs is the sensuous thought, which brings forth its own sensuous conception. Mine is the spiritual idea which transfigures thought.

All real being represents God, and is in Him. In this Science of being, man can no more relapse or collapse from perfection, than his divine Principle, or Father, can fall out of Himself into something below infinitude. Man's real ego, or selfhood, is goodness. If man's individuality were evil, he would be annihilated, for evil is self-destroying.

Man's individual being must reflect the supreme individual Being, to be His image and likeness; and this individuality never originated in molecule, corpuscle, materiality, or mortality. God holds man in the eternal bonds of Science,--in the immutable harmony of divine law. Man is a celestial; and in the spiritual universe he is forever individual and forever harmonious. "If God so clothe the grass of the field, ... shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?"

Sin must be obsolete,--dust returning to dust, nothingness to nothingness. Sin is not Mind; it is but the supposition that there is more than one Mind. It issues a false claim; and the claim, being worthless, is in reality no claim whatever. Matter is not Mind, to claim aught; but Mind is God, and evil finds no place in good. When we get near enough to God to see this, the springtide of Truth in Christian Science will burst upon us in the similitude of the Apocalyptic pictures. No night will be there, and there will be no more sea. There will be no need of the sun, for Spirit will be the light of the city, and matter will be proved a myth. Until centuries pass, and this vision of Truth is fully interpreted by divine Science, this prophecy will be scoffed at; but it is just as veritable now as it can be then. Science, divine Science, presents the grand and eternal verities of God and man as the divine Mind and that Mind's idea.

Mortal man is the antipode of immortal man, and the two should not be confounded. Bishop Foster said, in a lecture in Boston, "No man living hath yet seen man." This material sinful personality, which we misname man, is what St. Paul terms "the old man and his deeds," to be "put off."

Who can say what the absolute personality of God or man is? Who living hath seen God or a perfect man? In presence of such thoughts take off thy shoes and tread lightly, for this is holy ground. Surely the probation of mortals must go on after the change called death, that they may learn the definition of immortal being; or else their present mistakes would extinguish human existence. How long this false sense remains after the transition called death, no mortal knoweth; but this is sure, that the mists of error, sooner or later, will melt in the fervent heat of suffering, mortality will burst the barriers of sense, and man be found perfect and eternal. Of his intermediate conditions--the purifying processes and terrible revolutions necessary to effect this end--I am ignorant.

Inasmuch as these momentous facts in the Science of being must be learned some time, now is the most acceptable time for beginning the lesson. If Science is pointing the way, and is found to bring with it health, holiness, and immortality, then to-day is none too soon for entering this path. The proof that Christian Science is the way of salvation given by Christ, I consider well established. The present, as well as the future, reveals the fact that Truth is never understood too soon.

Has Truth, as demonstrated by Jesus, reappeared? Study Christian Science and practise it, and you will know that Truth has reappeared. What is demonstrably true cannot be gainsaid; but getting the letter and omitting the spirit of this Science is neither the comprehension of its Principle nor the practice of its Life.

HAS MAN A SOUL?

The Scriptures inform us that "the soul that sinneth, it shall die." Here _soul_ means sense and organic life; and this passage refers to the Jewish law, that a mortal should be put to death for his own sin, but not for another's. Not Soul, but mortal sense, sins and dies. Immortal man has immortal Soul and a deathless sense of being. Mortal man has but a false sense of Soul and body. He believes that Spirit, or Soul, exists in matter. This is pantheism, and is not the Science of Soul. The mind-quacks have so slight a knowledge of Soul that they believe material and sinning sense to be soul; and then they doctor this soul as if it were not even a material sense.

In Dr. Gordon's sermon on The Ministry of Healing, he said, "The forgiven soul in a sick body is not half a man." Is this pantheistic statement sound theology,--that Soul is in matter, and the immortal part of man a sinner? Is not this a disparagement of the person of man and a denial of God's power? Better far that we impute such doctrines to mortal opinion than to the divine Word.

To my sense, such a statement is a shocking reflection on the divine power. A mortal pardoned by God is not sick, he is made whole. He in whom sin, disease, and death are destroyed, is more than a fraction of himself. Such sermons, though clad in soft raiment, are spiritless waifs, literary driftwood on the ocean of thought; while Truth walks triumphantly over the waves of sin, sickness, and death.

The law of Life and Truth is the law of Christ, destroying all sense of sin and death. It does more than forgive the false sense named sin, for it pursues and punishes it, and will not let sin go until it is destroyed,--until nothing is left to be forgiven, to suffer, or to be punished. Forgiven thus, sickness and sin have no relapse. God's law reaches and destroys evil by virtue of the allness of God.

He need not know the evil He destroys, any more than the legislator need know the criminal who is punished by the law enacted. God's law is in three words, "I am All;" and this perfect law is ever present to rebuke any claim of another law. God pities our woes with the love of a Father for His child,--not by becoming human, and knowing sin, or naught, but by removing our knowledge of what is not. He could not destroy our woes totally if He possessed any knowledge of them. His sympathy is divine, not human. It is Truth's knowledge of its own infinitude which forbids the genuine existence of even a claim to error. This knowledge is light wherein there is no darkness,--not light holding darkness within itself. The consciousness of light is like the eternal law of God, revealing Him and nothing else.

Sympathy with sin, sorrow, and sickness would dethrone God as Truth, for Truth has no sympathy for error. In Science, the cure of the sick demonstrates this grand verity of Christian Science, that you cannot eradicate disease if you admit that God sends it or sees it. Material and mortal mind-healing (so-called) has for ages been a pretender, but has not healed mortals; and they are yet sick and sinful.

Disease and sin appear to-day in subtler forms than they did yesterday. They progress and will multiply into worse forms, until it is understood that disease and sin are unreal, _unknown_ to Truth, and never actual persons or real facts.

Our phraseology varies. To me _divine pardon_ is that divine presence which is the sure destruction of sin; and I insist on the destruction of sin as the only full proof of its pardon. "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might _destroy_ the works of the devil" (1 John iii. 8).

Jesus cast out evils, mediating between what is and is not, until a perfect consciousness is attained. He healed disease as he healed sin; but he treated them both, not as in or of matter, but as mortal beliefs to be exterminated. Physical and mental healing were one and the same with this master Metaphysician. If the evils called sin, sickness, and death had been forgiven in the generally accepted sense, they would have returned, to be again forgiven; but Jesus said to disease: "Come out of him, and enter no more into him." He said also: "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death;" and "Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven." The misinterpretation of such passages has retarded the progress of Christianity and the spiritualization of the race.

A magistrate's pardon may encourage a criminal to repeat the offense; because _forgiveness_, in the popular sense of the word, can neither extinguish a crime nor the motives leading to it. The belief in sin--its pleasure, pain, or power--must suffer, until it is self-destroyed. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

IS THERE ANY SUCH THING AS SIN?

Frequently when I touch this subject my meaning is ignorantly or maliciously misconstrued. Christian Science Mind-healing lifts with a steady arm, and cleaves sin with a broad battle-axe. It gives the lie to sin, in the spirit of Truth; but other theories make sin true. Jesus declared that the devil was "a liar, and the father of it." A lie is negation,--_alias_ nothing, or the opposite of something. Good is great and real. Hence its opposite, named _evil_, must be small and unreal. When this sense is attained, we shall no longer be the servants of sin, and shall cease to love it.

The domination of good destroys the sense of evil. To illustrate: It seems a great evil to belie and belittle Christian Science, and persecute a Cause which is healing its thousands and rapidly diminishing the percentage of sin. But reduce this evil to its lowest terms, _nothing_, and slander loses its power to harm; for even the wrath of man shall praise Him. The reduction of evil, in Science, gives the dominance to God, and must lead us to bless those who curse, that thus we may overcome evil with good.