God. It is the evil we do and say, the opposite of Life and Love, which is unreal. The notion that God lives in matter is pantheistic. God is not the author of an evil mind. Indeed, evil is not Mind. We are to learn that evil is the awful deception and unreality of being. Without this lesson we equally lose sight of the perfect Father and of the Divine Principle governing man.
Befogged in error (the error of believing that matter can be intelligent for good or evil) we can catch unbiassed glimpses of God only as the mists disperse, or as they melt into such thinness that we can perceive the divine image in some word or deed that indicates the true idea — the supremacy and reality of good, the nothingness and unreality of evil. The Scriptures say: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter; fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man” (the word duty not being in the Hebrew). Well does Myers sing: —
Therefore, O Lord, I will not fail or falter.
Nay, but I ask it, — nay, but I desire:
Lay on my lips Thine embers of the altar,
Seal with the sting and furnish with the fire.
The phrase mortal man is really a solecism, for man is immortal, and Truth pierces the error of mortals as a sunbeam penetrates the cloud. The error that saith “Soul is in body, Mind is in matter, and Good is in evil,” must unsay it, and cease such utterances; else God will be hidden from it, and man will sin without a sense of sin, leaning on matter instead of Spirit, limping with lameness, drooping with dyspepsia, consuming with disease, — all because of the blindness of this false sense of God and man.
We should hesitate to say Jehovah sins or suffers; but if sin and suffering are realities of being, whence did they come? Mind signifies God, — Infinity, not finity. How far removed from infidelity is the belief that can combine such opposites as holiness and unholiness, calling both Spirit, at the same time admitting that Spirit is God; virtually saying “He is good in one instance, and evil in another”? There are evil beliefs, called evil spirits, but they are not Spirit, or they could not be evil. Error of statement leads to error in action.
There is no evil in Spirit, and proportionately as we advance spiritually, evil disappears. This is the evidence of our position, for every scientific statement in Christianity, about God or man, has its proof.
The understanding that the Ego is Mind, and that there is but one Mind or Intelligence, begins at once to destroy the errors of mortal sense, and to supply the Truth of immortal sense, It makes the body harmonious, governed by Spirit instead of matter. It makes the nerves, the bones, the brains, to be servants instead of masters. If the body is governed by the higher law of Mind, its members are in submission to Life and Truth.
If brains, nerves, stomach, are intelligent, — if they talk to us, tell us how they are conditioned, and report how they feel, — then Spirit and matter commingle, and so do sickness and health, good and evil, Life and death; and who shall say which is the greater?
If the decision were left to the personal senses, evil would appear to be the master of good, sickness to be the rule of existence; while health would seem the exception, death the inevitable, and Life the supposition. Paul asked (2 Cor. vi. 15) “What fellowship hath Christ with Belial?” Remember, — Truth is greater than error, and we cannot put the greater into the lesser. Soul is greater than body; but if it were in the body, it would be less, and therefore could not be Spirit.
Man, governed by his Maker, having no other God, may triumph over sin, sickness, and death, and plant himself on the apostolic statement that “all things were made by him (the Word of God), and without him was not anything made that was made.”
If God made sin, if Good produced evil, and Truth resulted in error, Science would be helpless; but because God is not the author of these human discords, we may accept the conclusion that they have only a fabulous existence, and are of human instead of divine origin.
To hold yourself superior to sin — because God made you superior to it, and governs man — is wisdom. To fear sin is to misunderstand the Divine Science of Being and man's relation to God, to doubt His government, and distrust His omnipotent care. To hold yourself superior to sickness and death is equally wise, and in accordance with Divine Science ; and to fear them is impossible, when you understand God, and know that they are no part of His creation.
If you fully understood the relation you hold to God you could have no other Mind but His, — no other Love, Wisdom, and Truth, no other sense of Life, and no consciousness of matter or error.
If thought is startled at the strong claim of Science for the supremacy of good, and doubts it, ought we not, contrariwise, to be astounded at the vigorous claims of evil, and doubt them, — no longer thinking it natural to sin, and unnatural to forsake it, no longer imagining evil to be the real, and good the unreal? Truth should not seem as surprising and unnatural as error, and error should not seem as real as Truth. There is no error in Science, and our lives must be governed by Science in order to be in harmony with God, the Principle of all being.
Sound is a mental impression, made on human belief; the ear hears not. In Science sound is communicated through spiritual understanding, through the senses of Soul. Before human knowledge educated mortal thought into a false sense of things, — into belief in material origins, and away from the One Mind and true source, — I have no doubt the impressions of Truth were as distinct as sound, and came thus to the senses of primitive Christians. They talked with God. The medium of hearing being spiritual, it is normal and indestructible.
If Enoch's perception had been confined to the evidence before his material senses, he could never have walked with God, and been guided into prophecy and demonstration by Divine Science.
Spiritual sense is a conscious capacity to understand God. It unfolds to human comprehension its faith by works, more than by words. Its words are expressed only in “new tongues.” This involves the translation of matter back to the spiritual and original text, where the Principle and proof of Christianity are set forth in Jesus' demonstration, healing the sick, casting out error, and destroying death, — “the last enemy to he overcome.”
The suicidal sinner regards death as a friend, as a stepping-stone to immortality and bliss. The Bible calls it an enemy; and Jesus overcame death, instead of yielding to it. To him, therefore, it was not the threshold over which he must pass to Life and glory.
Mortal mind has a modus of its own, undirected and unsustained by God. It brings a rose into contact with the olfactory nerves, that they may smell it. In common methods it handles the rose. In the uncommon methods, it employs legerdemain, or rises, in credulous frenzy, to the belief that spirits unseen handle the flower for mortals.
Because all the methods of Mind are not understood, we say the lips must move in order to convey thought, that the undulations of the air convey sound, and that any other method must involve a miracle. The realities of being, its normal action and the origin of all things, are unseen to mortal sense; whereas the unreal and imitative movements of finite belief (that reverse the infinite modus and action) are self-styled the real. Whoever contradicts that supposition is called a deceiver, or said to be deceived. “As a man thinketh, so is he” in error; but as a man understandeth, so is he in Truth.
The supposed sensations of the body must either be the sensations of mind or of matter. Which are they? Is it not self-evident that matter has no sensation; and is it not equally self-evident that matter exists in belief only, and not in the understanding of being?
The sensation exists only in belief. When a tear starts for another's sorrow, has not mortal mind produced the effect seen in the lachrymal gland? Was it grief that caused the tear, or the effect of one mortal mind upon another? We
