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 enlighten or to elevate mankind spiritually. Materia medica, like its narcotics, pacifies mortal mind, and so helps the body, but it leaves both mind and body worse for the stupor and abnormal state it induces. Systems of metaphysics [ 31 ] improve mortal mind and body, for they bring out the immortal facts of both, namely that Life is continuous and harmonious, and, like a two-edged sword, they amputate error on both sides, destroy it in mortal mind, and thus prevent or remove its effects on the body. After this mental surgery mankind is better.
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
