is the opposite or absence of God, is a belief that is neither Mind nor one of its faculties, and is unreal because it is not begotten of the Father, Truth and Love.
Because sin brought sickness and death it proves them error, and because there is no death it proves death but a belief that Spirit destroys with the evidences of Truth and Life, showing you that death, or what appears that to the senses, comes from mortal belief instead of matter. Mortals are not intelligences, for there is but one intelligence, but one God or Mind. Mortal man is the belief that Life and intelligence are in and of matter, which belief disappears as the immortal appears whose only Life and intelligence is God—good. Spirit is only reached through the understanding and demonstration of Life, Truth, and Love.
God is not the author of error, inasmuch as Truth is not the origin of error, and error is not the result of intelligence. Belief is the author of error, and calls itself something when it is nothing; that saith I am man, but I am not the image and likeness of God. When Jesus explained the origin of what is termed mortal man, he said, “Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil [error], and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own; for he [ 20 ] is a liar, and the father of it.” The more material a belief is, the more tenacious in the error; and the stronger the manifestations of sense, the weaker are the indications of Soul.
What we term mortal, or erring mind, is but a belief and error from beginning to end, that sees only what it believes, and believes only what it sees through belief. This mortal belief, called man, says matter has intelligence and sensation, that nerves feel, brains think and sin, a stomach can make man cross, limbs can cripple him, and matter kills him. Such is the verdict of what are termed the five senses of matter, or the body, of which mortals are the victims, being taught by physiology, materia medica, etc., to revere those five personal lies which Truth at length destroys with spiritual sense and understanding; and in place of sentient matter we have sensationless bodies, and God the Soul of the body, and man's existence perpetual in its identification of Deity, harmony, and immortality.
To admit there is such a thing as matter requires another admission equally false; namely, that matter is self-creative, self-existent, and therefore eternal. Whence it follows there are two eternal causes warring forever with each other, and yet we say that Spirit is supreme and omnipotent. The body mortal is not man, for man is immortal, and that matter is eternal contradicts the demonstration of Life as Spirit, which would leave us to conclude that man originated in dust and returned to it, and the logic of events proved annihilation. Soul was never within a finite form. The limited never for a moment contained the unlimited and immortal.
Having marked out the line between immortal man or [ 21 ] the reality of being, and what we term mortal man and the unreal recognition of Life and intelligence as matter, we learn that the pleasure or pain of what is termed personal sense is a myth, and the father of all mythology, in which matter is supposed to be intelligent and to become “gods.” The evidence before the so-called personal senses is reversed by divine science, and disappears to Soul. Hence the impossibility for sensuous man to understand the science of Soul, and his opposition to it. The Scripture saith, “The carnal man is at enmity with God.” A mortal body and material sense are beliefs that spiritual understanding will destroy; but man will not lose his identity: in the conscious infinitude of being, it is impossible that he should lose aught whereby he gains all. The beliefs of matter, its supposed pleasures and pains, sickness, sin, and death, are all that will ever be lost.
What is deemed vegetable and animal life is a self-evident falsehood, when all that remains of it is death. God is the only Life; therefore Life is not structural and organic, and is never in its formations. Life is an intelligence that creates, and is reflected by its creations. If it were to enter what it creates, it would no longer be Life reflected, but absorbed; and the science of being would then be lost, through a mortal sense of Life as having a beginning and ending. The immortal basis of all being is Soul not body, Life and not death; and from this basis science reveals the glorious possibilities of man unlimited by a belief. We cannot learn Life through death; for in Spirit we lose all that we learn of matter even as in Truth we lose what we learn of error. “The last shall be first and the first last.” What we esteem as matter now will [ 22 ] sometime dissolve. Divine science puts not new wine into old bottles, Soul into body, the infinite into a finite. Our beliefs of matter must yield before we can grasp the facts of Spirit. The old belief must disappear, or the new idea will be spilled and the inspiration gone that lifts our being higher, restores Christian healing, and explains the great facts of being, raises the dead, changes our standpoints of reasoning from matter to Spirit, and now as of old casts out devils—error—and heals the sick.
Let us now examine more minutely the Soul of man, remembering that mortal man has no Soul, but is a belief of sense first and last. Continuing our definition of man, let us remember that back of this belief of Life, substance, and intelligence in matter, is the real and immortal man, and yet the fact is not behind the fable, but is all, and there is nothing beside that. The science of being reveals man perfect even as the Father is perfect; because the Soul of man is God, and man is governed by Soul instead of sense, by the law of Spirit instead of a supposed law of matter. The Scriptures inform us that “God is Love,” the “Truth and the Life;” therefore He is Principle and not person, and the body of Soul is man, the idea of this Principle, and his conscious Life and intelligence is Soul and not body. Soul is Spirit, and it forms the minutiæ and infinity of identities, and comprehends man as the creation of Soul. In this divine and metaphysical science we find the senses of man are spiritual, and attached to Soul instead of body; that thought passes from Soul to body, from Principle to its idea, to govern it, but never returns a sensation or report from body to Soul, for the body is not cognizant of evil or good.
[ 23 ] The science of being destroys the belief that Soul is in body, and man a separate intelligence from his Maker, and reveals but one Mind, one Spirit; thus precluding the possibility of sin, sickness, or death, or having more than one God when being is understood, and establishing the universal brotherhood of man, wherein one mind contends not with another, but all are of one mind. Soul and body are God and man, Principle and its idea, therefore man and his Maker are inseparable. The senses of Soul take cognizance only of the true idea—the entire creations of Life, Truth, and Love—hence there is nothing left to what is termed personal sense. Soul and body, God and man, are reached only and understood through the senses of Soul. Divine science reverses the statement of Soul and body, as astronomy reversed the plan of the solar system, and makes the body tributary to Mind; but we shall never understand this while admitting the belief that Soul is in body, and that non-intelligence named matter has Life and sensation. God, Soul, is, and was, and ever will be; and man is coexistent and coeternal with this Soul. Until the immortal body and perfect man become more apparent, we are not gaining the true idea of God: and the body will define the mind that governs it, whether it be Truth or error, belief or understanding, Spirit or matter; therefore acquaint now thyself with God and be at peace.
The various opinions and beliefs of mortal man, culminating in dogma, doctrine, and theory, among which are materia medica, physiology, hygiene, etc., are predicated of matter, and afford not a single idea of God, Truth. Ideas, like numbers and notes, start from Principle instead of person, and admit no beliefs concerning [ 24 ] them when once their Principle is understood. The false foundations of knowledge brought sin and death, through the belief that Spirit and matter commingle, and they rest upon no foundation that time and eternity are not wearing away. Finite belief can never do justice to Truth in any direction: it limits all things, and would compress Mind, that is infinite, beneath a skull-bone. It can neither apprehend nor worship the Infinite, and seeks to divide the one Spirit into many, to accommodate its finite sense of Soul. Through this error it has “lords many and gods many.” While Jesus said, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me, and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” we behold the zeal of belief to establish the opposite error of gods many; that argument of the snake, in the allegory, “I will make ye as gods,” goes on through
