as asserting that a belief in such an action of the mind, distressing others, is scientific. It should no longer be said in Israel that “the parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.” Sympathy with error should disappear. One erring mind, transferring its thoughts to another, only serves to prolong the discord and illusion that ought to be short-lived.
The transmission of disease, or certain idiosyncrasies, would be impossible if this great fact of Life were learned: namely, that nothing inharmonious can enter it, for Life is God. Heredity is a prolific subject for belief to pin itself upon, but if nothing is real but the right, we can have no dangerous inheritances, and away go the ills of flesh.
John Young, of Edinburgh, writes, “God is the father of Mind, and of nothing else.” This is “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” of human beliefs, and preparing the way of Science. Let us learn of the real and eternal, and prepare for the reign of Spirit, the kingdom of heaven, — the reign and rule of universal harmony, that cannot be lost, or remain forever unseen.
Already the shadow of His right hand rests upon the hour. Ye who can discern the face of the sky, — the sign material, — how much more should you discern the sign mental, compass the severance of sin and sickness from the thoughts that produce them, and understand the Truth that corrects and destroys them. To cut down all that beareth not good fruit was the mission of our Master, and his mission was to the very hearts that rejected him.
Judaism, enjoining the limited form of a national religion, was the antithesis of Christianity. It was merely a finite and material scheme, carried out in speculative theories regarding God, man, sanitary methods, and religious means. The Jewish recognition of God, as only a person and king, has not yet departed. Creeds and rituals have not quite washed their hands of rabbinical lore. To-day echoes the cry of bygone centuries, “Crucify him! Pursue Truth at every advancing footstep, with sword and spear!” “He maketh himself as God,” was the Jewish accusation against him who planted Christianity on the foundation of Spirit, and would know no other Life, Intelligence, or Substance except God.
All forms of error support the false conclusion that there is more than one Intelligence; that material history is as real and important as spiritual history; that mortal belief is as conclusively Mind as immortal Truth: that there are two separate antagonistic entities and beings, two powers, — namely, Spirit and matter, — resulting in a third person (mortal man), who carries out the delusions of sin, sickness, and death.
The first power is admitted to be good, an Intelligence named God. The second power, evil, is the opposite of good. It cannot be Intelligence, though thus named. The third, man, is a supposed mixture of the first and second powers, of Intelligence and non-intelligence, of Spirit and matter.
Such theories are self-evidently erroneous. They can never stand the test of Science. Judging them by their fruits, they are corrupt. When will the ages under stand the Ego, and see only one God?
This incoherent mass of self-assertion gave sinners the notion that they could create what God cannot, — namely, sinful mortality, — usurping the name without the nature of Mind. In Science it can never be said by any mortal, “I have a mind of my own, regardless of God.”
A distinguished clergyman writes, in his sermon on The Great Purpose of Christianity: “The highest existence in the universe is Mind, for God is Mind; and the development of that Principle which assimilates us to God must be our supreme good. . . . He imparts, as it were, Himself. . . . We all possess within us what is of more worth than the external creation. For this outward system is the product of Mind.”
In the same vein, slightly changing its wording, is Bowring's stanza: —
We see Thy hand; it leads us, it supports us;
We hear Thy voice; it counsels and it courts us;
And then we turn away; and still Thy kindness
Informs our blindness.
It has been said, and truly, that Christianity must be Science, and Science must be Christianity; else one or the other is false and useless; but neither of those is unimportant or untrue, and they are alike in demonstration. If God is within and without all things, what and where is matter, which does not express Spirit?
When you say “Man's body is matter,” I say with Paul, “Be willing rather to be absent from the body, and present with the Lord.” Yield your belief of Mind in matter, and have but one Mind, even God.
Medicine may inform you that Paul's Christianity, that regards Mind scientifically as separate from matter, indicates an unnatural state, or catalepsy; and it may further instruct you as to the dangerous nature of this disorder, telling you how it ends in death. But turn to the inspired writers and you read: “If a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death;” “Henceforth know we no man after the flesh.”
We must destroy the belief that Life and Intelligence are in matter, and plant ourselves upon what is pure and perfect. Paul said, “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.” Sooner or later we shall learn that the fetters of man's finite, capacity are forged by the illusion that he lives in body instead of Soul, in matter rather than Spirit.
The possession of but one God, one Mind, unfolds the divine law of loving thy neighbor as thyself. Selfishness hinders man's natural drift towards God, and conveys thought in selfish channels, where opposite and contending interests sway mankind. It tips the beam of being to the side of error, instead of Truth. This throws our weight into the scale of matter instead of Spirit.
In the scientific relation of God to man we find that one man's meat is not another's poison, but that what feeds one feeds all; as Jesus showed, with the loaves and fishes, when Spirit, not matter, was the source of supply.
How long it must be before we arrive at the demonstration of scientific being, no man knoweth, — not even the Son, but the Father; but one thing is certain, that sin, sickness, and death will continue their delusions until we reach that Utopian goal.
The footsteps of thought, as they pass higher from material standpoints, are slow, and portend a long night to the traveller; but the guardians of the gloom are the angels of His presence, the spiritual intuitions that tell us when the night is far spent and the dawn approacheth. Whoso opens the way in Science is a pilgrim and stranger, marking out the path for generations yet unborn.
The history of our country, like many other histories, illustrates the might of Mind, and shows human power to be proportionate to the embodiment of right motives. A few immortal sentences, stimulated by justice, have broken fetters, and abolished whipping-posts and slave-markets. Tyranny will go down in blood, and the breath of freedom come from the cannon's mouth.
To legally abolish slavery in the United States was good, but its abolition in the human mind is a more difficult task. The question of right, the Divine Mind must decide. He must destroy the human motive of slavery, lest it germinate in new forms of tyranny. We still have men and women of all races in bondage, ignorant how to obtain their freedom. The rights of man were vindicated in a single instance, when African slavery was abolished over a small portion of our globe; but that instance was only prophetic of further steps toward the banishment of slavery, in all forms and under all circumstances.
This book was written years before I read Dr. Channing on Spiritual Freedom: —
I call that mind free which masters the senses, which protects itself against animal appetites, which contemns pleasure and pain in comparison with its own energy, which penetrates beneath the body and recognizes its own reality and greatness, which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering,
