Science and Health. Mary Baker G. Eddy

single material accompaniment. The potter is not in the clay, or that clay would have power over the potter. God produces his own personality, and cannot get into it because it is only the idea of Him who is the circumference and infinite Spirit of all things real or eternal. “Knowledge” was a mortal and finite sense of things that Spirit disclaimed, for it placed cause in effect, and would limit Life, and fasten the infinite to discord and death. When things are interpreted by their Principle they can be understood, but if explained by what is termed personal sense they cannot be understood, and are only accepted through some belief, and become man-made theories and doctrines. Impressions received through the hearing of the ear, material sight, touch, etc., are beliefs. Ideas come from Soul instead of sense, from the spiritual instead of the material; for they are the offspring of Principle, and demonstrate nothing but that which is good and a blessing to man. Spiritual understanding is unerring. Hence its necessity to Christianity and to [ 26 ] establish truth. Knowledge is a blind belief—a Samson shorn of its strength—when it loses organizations to support it. It is neither moral suasion, moral might, idea, nor Principle, but a blind admission from a material basis. Adhesion, cohesion, and attraction are forces supposed to be material: but they are qualities of mind; they belong to Principle, and support the equipoise of thought that launches the earth into its orbit, and says to the proud wave, “Hither and no farther.” We tread on forces. Withdraw them, and creation would collapse. Knowledge and belief name these mental forces matter, but metaphysical science gives them back to mind. There is no inherent power in what is termed matter; for all that is material is a product of mortal thought, and governed by that thought. God creates and governs the spiritual universe and man, and they are the products of Spirit, even the ideas that He evolves, and which are obedient to the Mind that made them. There is no other universe or man. Mortal mind has translated the spiritual into the material, and must now give back the original rendering, to escape from the mortality of its own error. Mind is the source of all action, and there is no inertia in it. Perpetual and harmonious action belong to unerring Mind. What is termed mortal mind is prolific of error, sickness, sin, and death. It acts and it reacts, then stops. But these are the results of a belief, and not the facts of Mind, that is the same in Life, Truth, and Love yesterday, to-day, and forever. Ideas, like numbers and notes, are governed by their Principle, which admits of no beliefs, but rests upon the understanding.

      What is termed personal sense indicates disease as a reality and identity; but the Scriptures inform us that [ 27 ] Spirit made all that was made, even while material sense is declaring that matter makes disease, and mortal mind is not its maker. This so-called personal and material sense supports all that is untrue, selfish, or debased; it would put Soul into soil, Life into limbo, and doom all things to decay, and then re-create them from dust. We must put to silence this lie or what is called material sense with the Truth of spiritual sense, and let the error cease that brought sin and death and would shut out the pure sense of Spirit.

      Is a sick man a sinner above all others? No; but he is not the idea of God. Weary of their beliefs of matter, whence so much sorrow comes, the sick grow more spiritual, even as the error or belief that Life is in matter yields to the spiritual fact of being.

      A wicked man is not the idea of God; he is nothing but an error—a belief that hatred, envy, pride, malice, and hypocrisy have Life abiding in them. Life and its idea, Truth and its idea, never made a sick man or a sinner. Mortals and mortal mind are not the ideas of God, and were never created by him in His own image and likeness.

      We look on a corpse, not as a man, but simply what is termed matter. We say the body is dead; but it was the departure of a mortal belief, and not matter, that produced that effect. The consent of that belief to die occasioned the phenomenon before you, whereas you say it was matter. You believe that Soul is lost spiritually, and yet it is immortal. If Soul sinned it would die, only because it hath no element of self-destruction, such as sin, sickness, or death, is it immortal. Is man lost spiritually? No; he can only be lost materially. All sin is [ 28 ] material, it cannot be spiritual. Sin exists only so long as the belief of matter remains. It is the sense of sin, and not a soul of sin, that is lost. Entity signifies the particular nature of being; and God, without the image and likeness of Himself, named man, would be nonentity. Spiritual man, and there is none other, is the idea of God, that cannot be lost or separated from its Principle. When the evidence before the so-called personal senses was overcome by the spiritual sense of Soul, Paul declared that nothing could separate him from God—the sweet sense and presence of Life, Truth, and Love.

      Truth, understood and demonstrated, is eternal Life. There can be no rescue of mortal man from the belief of sin, sickness, and death, until he learns that God is his only Life. While the belief continues of life and sensation in the body, it will be mortal, and mortals will be governed in belief by their bodies, governed by sin, sickness, and death.

      Harmony is controlled by Principle, produced by it, and abides with it. Soul, Spirit, is this Principle of man; hence his happiness is not at the disposal of personal sense, or his Life controlled by death, and spiritual Truth contaminated by material error. Do you object to understanding the falsity of the senses, and ask whence cometh our proof of this? We answer: the self-evident falsehood that matter has sensation, and our own demonstrations that mortal mind is what suffers, feels, sees, etc.; and allowing this proof to point higher, and acknowledging, with mathematical certainty, that the lesser demonstration proves the higher, the same as three units added to three, making six, prove that three and three trillions are six trillions. The belief of sensation in nerves is no proof of it. [ 29 ] The inebriate believes there is pleasure in intoxication, and the sinner in sin. The thief believes he has gained something by stealing, and the hypocrite by hiding himself; but the science of being corrects these mistakes, and the demonstration of Truth destroys such error.

      Electricity is not a vital fluid, but an element of mortal mind, the less material thought that forms the link between what is termed matter and mortal mind; but recollect that both are strata of belief, the one called mind, the other matter; the grosser substratum, named matter, is the poorest counterfeit of Mind, the more ethereal substratum of mortal belief, named mind, is the nearer counterfeit of immortal Mind, or Truth, and Love; but both are false presentations, for immortal Mind and mortal belief never touch. The only manifestation of God through mortal man is as the light passing through the window-pane. The mortal thought through which Truth appears must have lost so much of its materiality that it becomes a transparency for Truth, like the cloud melting into thin vapor, that no longer hides the light. The electricity of mortal mind, its gases and forces, are the counterfeits of the unerring and eternal Mind's omnipotence as Truth, its attraction as Love, and its adhesion and cohesion as Life, producing the eternal identities. Electricity is the essence of mortal and erring mind, that counterfeits that essence of the unerring and eternal Mind, termed Holy Ghost, the great difference being that one is divine and holy, and the other human and unholy. The self-destructive forces of mortal thought, expressed in the earthquake, the wind, the wave, the lightning, fire, and the ferocity of beasts, are the counterfeits of divine justice, called in the [ 30 ] Scripture the anger of the Lord, but explained in metaphysics as the strength and permanence of Truth and its supremacy ever asserting itself. Metaphysical science brings to light Truth and its supremacy, universal harmony, God's entirety, and the nothingness of matter.

      Doctrines, theories, and knowledge are speculative opinions and beliefs, the testimony of what is termed material sense; hence the warfare between Truth and error and the evidences of the spiritual and the so-called material senses until each and every question is determined by the immutable Principle, the real. Metaphysical science reveals the spiritual fact of all things. There is no material Truth, and what is termed the personal senses can take no cognizance of spiritual Truth. Divine or metaphysical science reverses the entire evidence before the material senses, and tears away its foundations; hence the enmity of mortal man towards it, and the impossibility for it to be understood only as the errors of belief disappear. The deductions from a material basis termed natural science possess no intrinsic worth, whereas the revelations from a spiritual basis reach man with harmony, and interpret Truth, and these different sources produce different streams, as we learn from witnessing their effects. The Truth of being and divine science treat disease as error, and heal it with Truth. But materia medica treats it as truth, and claims to heal it with matter, error. Systems material are but temporary, and their effects have never been to