All material theories are man-made opinions and beliefs, referred to in the Scripture as the “tree of knowledge,” or information obtained from false premises, from the testimony of a serpent since termed material sense. A sense of material things is mortal evidence, while yet it claims the authority of Mind, that is immortal. Inferences from false premises result in all the discords of mind and body. Reasoning, based upon Principle, lifts the contemplation of Life and intelligence above mortality, and gathers thought into a sense of harmony and immortality, away from the sense of sin, sickness, and death.
Because God is Spirit, the unerring and eternal Soul, He is separate from mortal thought, the erring, changing, and dying—and because He is infinite Life He cannot be in finite forms that but reflect Life; and no portion of the infinite can be separated from itself and remain God, the infinite, still. Life is no more in the forms that express it than substance is in its shadow. If life was in man or material forms, it would be subject to the conditions of matter, and must end in death.
A belief is subject to the conditions of that belief. Death is real, and sickness and sin are real, only as beliefs. Like the darkness that hides the sun, but cannot put it out, a belief may silence the sense of harmony to mortal thought, but cannot destroy harmony to immortal [ 32 ] Soul. A finite sense of Soul is not a correct sense of it: Soul is only another name for Spirit, God, and is Life, Truth, and Love. When we lose a finite sense of it and gain the understanding of Soul, we shall learn in divine science all things that pertain to being, for no sin, therefore “no night is there.” Day may decline and shadows hide the sun; but the darkness flees when the earth has turned on its axis, for the solar centre is the same. The sun has not been affected by the action of the earth. Thus it is that metaphysics finds Soul, like the sun, uninfluenced by mortal mind or body, and the central Life and intelligence around which all else revolves harmoniously in the systems of Mind where man's spiritual being and identity are. Not sense but Soul defines happiness and Life in divine science, and all science is divine. Human thought never projected the least portion of science: it has caught the echo and repeated it, but could never produce the first tone that sent forth that certain sound.
We shall never understand the science of being while we believe that Soul sins or is in the body, and when we do understand that science we shall be a law of Life to our bodies, even the higher law of Soul that prevails over sense and gives harmony and immortality to man. The so-called laws of matter can never make man healthy, harmonious, or immortal: hence the importance of understanding the spiritual law of being, that brings out the perfection and immortality of thoughts that we name things. Belief hath sought out many inventions, but not one of them can solve a problem without its Principle. No more can we make the body harmonious without understanding Soul sufficiently to know that it governs the [ 33 ] body, and that the governor is not within the governed. The body is like numbers that are harmonious governed by their principle; the intelligence not in the number, but made manifest by it.
A belief of life in matter has no Life in God, and the apostle Paul tells us, “When God who is our life shall appear, we shall be like unto Him in glory.” To examine our body that we may learn what the state of our health is, or what our prospect for Life, is morally wrong; for it would take the government out of the hands of God. To employ drugs to destroy disease manifests no faith in God, the Principle of all harmony, and as one of the ancient healers and Christians writes, “He is a very present help in times of trouble.”
When it is fairly understood that Spirit controls the body, and man should have no other mind but God, mystery and miracle will disappear. The belief that Life is in the body is changed by another universal law of mortal mind to a belief of death, and then mortal man and the mortal tree or flower are supposed to die, whereas the fact remains in metaphysical science that man and the universe are immortal and spiritual. The spiritual fact and the material belief of things are antipodes, the exact opposites of each other; and recollect the spiritual is the real, and because it is so, and the material is the opposite of the spiritual, it must be the unreal. If life in matter is a falsity, which it is, there can be no death; for Spirit and all things spiritual are eternal.
The Principle or Soul of music governs sound, and if mortal man caught harmony of the car or a mortal belief of it he would lose it again, and must gain its science to be the master of chords and discords. We find that [ 34 ] music, left to the decisions of material sense, is liable to misapprehension and discord, and controlled by a belief, instead of the understanding, it must be imperfect. Even thus, man, not understood in science, his Principle or Soul and its government cast aside as incomprehensible, is left to conjecture, in the hands of ignorance, and at the disposal of a belief, or what is termed material sense, and this sense propagates discords and terms them man; but they are no more man than the music that is incorrect is music. It is this very ignorance, and belief based on a material sense of things that hide their spiritual beauty and good. Understanding this, Paul said, “Neither height nor depth, nor any other creature, can separate me from the love of God.” Love cannot be deprived of its manifestation and object; joy cannot be turned into sorrow; good can never produce evil; and Life cannot result in death in the science of being. Hence the perfect man, governed by the perfect Principle of being, which we name God—his immortality, sinlessness, and forever existence.
Anatomy and theology have never defined man as created by God, Spirit, and as God's man. The first explains the man of man, created materially instead of spiritually, and from the lowest instead of the highest conceptions of being. It defines man as matter, and Mind originating from and dependent upon matter for every function. Theology joins with anatomy in its conception, formation, and government of man. It takes him up in all these materially. It loses Spirit, drops the true tone and accepts the discord, lays aside the Principle that produces harmonious man, and deals only with matter, the discord, as a creator, calling that man which [ 35 ] is not the counterpart but the counterfeit of God's man. Then it would explain how to make that man a Christian, and how to start from the basis of a discord the concord of being. Such are some of the leading beliefs that serve as milestones to point out the rough places that metaphysical science must make smooth. Mortal man, made up of sin, sickness, and death, is but a belief that pain and pleasure, life and death, holiness and unholiness, mingle in one phenomenon called man. But man is the image and likeness of God, of Life, Truth, and Love, spiritually conceived and created. All the vanity of the Gentiles can never make one hair white or black in science that lays the axe at the root of the belief that Life or Mind is in the body, to cut it down either through a belief of death or the understanding of Life.
Admitting God the only Mind and Life leaves no occasion for sin or death, turns thought into new and healthy channels, to the contemplation of immortal things, and away from the person to the Principle of man; whence we learn his science, and how to be perfect even as the Father, the eternal intelligence, is perfect. Because Life is God, it must be eternal. And there is but one God, and therefore but one Life, and this is self-existent and forever—the “I am” that was and is, and nothing can destroy. Christ, Truth, is “the resurrection and life,” for it destroys the error or belief that Mind is buried in the body, that Life is in what is termed matter, and subject to death. The figurative tree of knowledge is represented in the Scripture as bearing the fruits of sin, sickness, and death. Then ought we not to judge this knowledge, that is conveyed through the senses material, as dangerous to partake of, for the Scripture teaches that “the tree is known by its fruits.”
[ 36 ] The resistance to these cardinal points of metaphysical science will yield in the proportion that mortal man yields to immortal man, sin to holiness, sickness to health, and a belief to the understanding of being. We had sanguine hopes of the immediate acceptance of metaphysical science until we learned its vastness, the fixedness of belief, and mortal mind's hatred of Truth. Until the scientific relation of God to man is perceived, we shall never reach the demonstration of scientific being in its small beginnings,