God, claims another father, and denies spiritual sonship; but as many as
receive the knowledge of God in Science must reflect, in some degree, the
power of Him who gave and giveth man dominion over all the earth.
As soldiers of the cross we must be brave, and let Science declare the
immortal status of man, and deny the evidence of the material senses, which
testify that man dies.
As the image of God, or Life, man forever reflects and embodies Life, not
death. The material senses testify falsely. They presuppose that God is
good and that man is evil, that Deity is deathless, but that man dies,
losing the divine likeness.
Science and material sense conflict at all points, from the revolution of
the earth to the fall of a sparrow. It is mortality only that dies.
To say that you and I, as mortals, will not enter this dark shadow of
material sense, called _death_, is to assert what we have not proved; but
man in Science never dies. Material sense, or the belief of life in matter,
must perish, in order to prove man deathless.
As Truth supersedes error, and bears the fruits of Love, this understanding
of Truth subordinates the belief in death, and demonstrates Life as
imperative in the divine order of being.
Jesus declares that they who believe his sayings will never die; therefore
mortals can no more receive everlasting life by believing in death, than
they can become perfect by believing in imperfection and living
imperfectly.
Life is God, and God is good. Hence Life abides in man, if man abides in
good, if he lives in God, who holds Life by a spiritual and not by a
material sense of being.
A sense of death is not requisite to a proper or true sense of Life, but
beclouds it. Death can never alarm or even appear to him who fully
understands Life. The death-penalty comes through our ignorance of
Life,--of that which is without beginning and without end,--and is the
punishment of this ignorance.
Holding a material sense of Life, and lacking the spiritual sense of it,
mortals die, in belief, and regard all things as temporal. A sense material
apprehends nothing strictly belonging to the nature and office of Life. It
conceives and beholds nothing but mortality, and has but a feeble concept
of immortality.
In order to reach the true knowledge and consciousness of Life, we must
learn it of good. Of evil we can never learn it, because sin shuts out the
real sense of Life, and brings in an unreal sense of suffering and death.
Knowledge of evil, or belief in it, involves a loss of the true sense of
good, God; and to know death, or to believe in it, involves a temporary
loss of God, the infinite and only Life.
Resurrection from the dead (that is, from the belief in death) must come to
all sooner or later; and they who have part in this resurrection are they
upon whom the second death has no power.
The sweet and sacred sense of the permanence of man's unity with his Maker
can illumine our present being with a continual presence and power of good,
opening wide the portal from death into Life; and when this Life shall
appear "we shall be like Him," and we shall go to the Father, not through
death, but through Life; not through error, but through Truth.
All Life is Spirit, and Spirit can never dwell in its antagonist, matter.
Life, therefore, is deathless, because God cannot be the opposite of
Himself. In Christian Science there is no matter; hence matter neither
lives nor dies. To the senses, matter appears to both live and die, and
these phenomena appear to go on _ad infinitum_; but such a theory implies
perpetual disagreement with Spirit.
Life, God, being everywhere, it must follow that death can be nowhere;
because there is no place left for it.
Soul, Spirit, is deathless. Matter, sin, and death are not the outcome of
Spirit, holiness, and Life. What then are matter, sin, and death? They can
be nothing except the results of material consciousness; but material
consciousness can have no real existence, because it is not a living--that
is to say, a divine and intelligent--reality.
That man must be vicious before he can be virtuous, dying before he can be
deathless, material before he can be spiritual, is an error of the senses;
for the very opposite of this error is the genuine Science of being.
Man, in Science, is as perfect and immortal now, as when "the morning stars
sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."
With Christ, Life was not merely a sense of existence, but a sense of might
and ability to subdue material conditions. No wonder "people were
astonished at his doctrine; for he taught them as one having authority, and
not as the scribes."
As defined by Jesus, Life had no beginning; nor was it the result of
organization, or of an infusion of power into matter. To him, Life was
Spirit.
Truth, defiant of error or matter, is Science, dispelling a false sense and
leading man into the true sense of selfhood and Godhood; wherein the mortal
does not develop the immortal, nor the material the spiritual, but wherein
true manhood and womanhood go forth in the radiance of eternal being and
its perfections, unchanged and unchangeable.
This generation seems too material for any strong demonstration over death,
and hence cannot bring out the infinite reality of Life,--namely, that
there is no death, but only Life. The present mortal sense of being is too
finite for anchorage in infinite good, God, because mortals now believe in
the possibility that Life can be evil.
The achievement of this ultimatum of Science, complete triumph over death,
requires time and immense spiritual growth.
I have by no means spoken of myself, I _cannot_ speak of myself as
"sufficient for these things." I insist only upon the fact, as it exists in
divine Science, that man dies not, and on the words of the Master in
support of this verity,--words which can never "pass away till all be
fulfilled."
Because of these profound reasons I urge Christians to have more faith in
living than in dying. I exhort them to accept Christ's promise, and unite
the influence of their own thoughts with the power of his teachings, in the
Science of being. This will interpret the divine power to human capacity,
and enable us to _apprehend_, or lay hold upon, "that for which," as Paul
says in the third chapter of Philippians, we are also "apprehended of [or
grasped by] Christ Jesus,"--the ever-present Life which knows no death, the
omnipresent Spirit which knows no matter.
Personal Statements
Many misrepresentations are made concerning my doctrines, some of which are
as unkind and unjust as they are untrue; but I can only repeat the Master's
words: "They know not what they do."
The foundations of these assertions, like the structure raised thereupon,
are vain shadows, repeating--if the popular couplet may be so paraphrased--
The old, old story,
Of _Satan_ and his _lie_.
In the days of Eden, humanity was misled by a false personality,--a talking
snake,--according to Biblical history. This pretender taught the opposite
of Truth. This abortive ego, this fable of error, is laid bare in Christian
Science.
Human theories call, or miscall, this evil a child of God. Philosophy would
multiply and subdivide personality into everything that exists, whether
expressive or not expressive of the Mind which is God. Human wisdom says of
evil, "The Lord knows it!" thus carrying out the serpent's assurance: "In
the day ye eat thereof [when you, lie, get the floor], then your eyes shall
be opened [you shall be conscious matter], and ye shall be as gods, knowing
good and evil [you shall believe a lie, and this lie shall seem truth]."
Bruise the head of this serpent, as Truth and "the woman" are doing in
Christian Science, and it stings your heel, rears its crest proudly, and
goes on saying, "Am I not myself? Am I not mind and matter, person and
thing?" We should answer: "Yes! you are indeed yourself, and need most of
all to be rid of this self, for it is very far from God's likeness."
The egotist must come down and learn, in humility, that God never made
evil. An evil ego, and his assumed power, are falsities. These falsities
need a denial. The falsity is the teaching that matter can be conscious;
and conscious matter implies pantheism. This pantheism I unveil. I try to
show its all-pervading presence in certain forms of theology and
philosophy, where it becomes error's affirmative to Truth's negative.
Anatomy and physiology make mind-matter a habitant of the cerebellum,
whence it telegraphs and telephones over its own body, and goes forth into
an imaginary sphere of its own creation and limitation, until it finally
dies in order to better itself. But Truth never dies, and death is not the
goal which Truth seeks.
The evil ego has but the visionary substance of matter. It lacks the
substance of Spirit,--Mind, Life, Soul. Mortal mind is self-creative and
self-sustained, until it becomes non-existent. It has no origin or
existence in Spirit, immortal Mind, or good. Matter is not truly conscious;
and mortal error, called _mind_, is not Godlike. These are the shadowy and
false, which neither think nor speak.
All Truth is from inspiration and revelation,--from Spirit, not from flesh.
We do not see much of the real man here, for he is God's man; while ours is
man's man.
I do not deny, I maintain, the individuality and reality of man; but I do
so on a divine Principle, not based on a human conception and birth. The
scientific man and his Maker are here; and you would be none other than
this man, if you would subordinate the fleshly perceptions to the spiritual
sense and source of being.
Jesus said, "I and my Father are one." He taught no selfhood as existent in
matter. In his identity there is no evil. Individuality and Life were real
to him only as spiritual and good, not as material or evil. This incensed
the rabbins against Jesus, because it was an indignity to their
personality; and this personality they regarded as both good and evil, as
is still claimed by the worldly-wise. To them evil was even more the ego
than was the good. Sin, sickness, and death were evil's concomitants. This
evil ego they believed must extend throughout the universe, as being
equally identical and self-conscious with God. This ego was in the
earthquake, thunderbolt, and tempest.
The Pharisees fought Jesus on this issue. It furnished the battle-ground of
the past, as it does of the present. The fight was an effort to enthrone
evil. Jesus assumed the burden of disproof by destroying sin, sickness,
and death, to sight and sense.
Nowhere in Scripture is evil connected with good, the being of God, and
with every passing hour it is losing its false claim to existence or
consciousness. All that can exist is God and His idea.
Credo
It is fair to ask of every one a reason for the faith within. Though it be
but to repeat my twice-told tale,--nay, the tale already told a hundred
times,--yet ask, and I will answer.
_Do you believe in God?_
I believe more in Him than do most Christians, for I have no faith in any
other thing or being. He sustains my individuality. Nay, more--He _is_ my
individuality and my Life. Because He lives, I live. He heals all my ills,
destroys my iniquities, deprives death of its sting, and robs the grave of
its victory.
To me God is All. He is best understood as Supreme Being, as infinite and
conscious Life, as the affectionate Father and Mother of all He creates;
but this divine Parent no more enters into His creation than the human
father enters into his child. His creation is not the Ego, but the
reflection of the Ego. The Ego is God Himself, the infinite Soul.
I believe that of which I am conscious through the understanding, however
faintly able to demonstrate Truth and Love.
_Do you believe in man?_
I believe in the individual man, for I understand that man is as definite
and eternal as God, and that man is coexistent with God, as being the
eternally divine idea. This is demonstrable by the simple appeal to human
consciousness.
But I believe less in the sinner, wrongly named _man_. The more I
understand true humanhood, the more I see it to be sinless,--as ignorant of
sin as is the perfect Maker.
To me the reality and substance of being are _good_, and nothing else.
Through the eternal reality of existence I reach, in thought, a glorified
consciousness of the only living God and the genuine man. So long as I hold
evil in consciousness, I cannot be wholly good.
You cannot simultaneously serve the mammon of materiality and the God of
spirituality. There are not two realities of being, two opposite states of
existence. One should appear real to us, and the other unreal, or we lose
the Science of being. Standing in no basic Truth, we make "the worse appear
the better reason," and the unreal masquerades as the real, in our thought.
Evil is without Principle. Being destitute of Principle, it is devoid of
Science. Hence it is undemonstrable, without proof. This gives me a clearer
right to call evil a negation, than to affirm it to be something which God
sees and knows, but which He straightway commands mortals to shun or
relinquish, lest it destroy them. This notion of the destructibility of
Mind implies the possibility of its defilement; but how can infinite Mind
be defiled?
_Do you believe in matter_?
I believe in matter only as I believe in evil, that it is something to be
denied and destroyed to human consciousness, and is unknown to the Divine.
We should watch and pray that we enter not into the temptation of
pantheistic belief in matter as sensible mind. We should subjugate it as
Jesus did, by a dominant understanding of Spirit.
At best, matter is only a phenomenon of mortal mind, of which evil is the
highest degree; but really there is no such thing as _mortal mind_,--though
we are compelled to use the phrase in the endeavor to express the
underlying thought.
In reality there are no material states or stages of consciousness, and
matter has neither Mind nor sensation. Like evil, it is destitute of Mind,
for Mind is God.
The less consciousness of evil or matter mortals have, the easier it is for
them to evade sin, sickness, and death,--which are but states of false
belief,--and awake from the troubled dream, a consciousness which is
without Mind or Maker.
Matter and evil cannot be conscious, and consciousness should not be evil.
Adopt this rule of Science, and you will discover the material origin,
growth, maturity, and death of sinners, as the history of man, disappears,
and the everlasting facts of being appear, wherein man is the reflection
of immutable good.
Reasoning from false premises,--that Life is material, that immortal Soul
is sinful, and hence that sin is eternal,--the reality of being is neither
seen, felt, heard, nor understood. Human philosophy and human reason can
never make one hair white or black, except in belief; whereas the
demonstration of God, as in Christian Science, is gained through Christ as
perfect manhood.
In pantheism the world is bereft of its God, whose place is ill supplied by
the pretentious usurpation, by matter, of the heavenly sovereignty.
_What say you of woman?_
Man is the generic term for all humanity. Woman is the highest species of
man, and this word is the generic term for all women; but not one of all
these individualities is an Eve or an Adam. They have none of them lost
their harmonious state, in the economy of God's wisdom and government.
The Ego is divine consciousness, eternally radiating throughout all space
in the idea of God, good, and not of His opposite, evil. The Ego is
revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; but the full Truth is found only
in divine Science, where we see God as Life, Truth, and Love. In the
scientific relation of man to God, man is reflected not as human soul, but
as the divine ideal, whose Soul is not in body, but is God,--the divine
Principle of man. Hence Soul is sinless and immortal, in contradistinction
to the supposition that there can be sinful souls or immortal sinners.
This Science of God and man is the Holy Ghost, which reveals and sustains
the unbroken and eternal harmony of both God and the universe. It is the
kingdom of heaven, the ever-present reign of harmony, already with us.
Hence the need that human consciousness should become divine, in the
coincidence of God and man, in contradistinction to the false consciousness
of both good and evil, God and devil,--of man separated from his Maker.
This is the precious redemption of soul, as mortal sense, through Christ's
immortal sense of Truth, which presents Truth's spiritual idea, _man_ and
_woman_.
_What say you of evil?_
God is not the so-called ego of evil; for evil, as a supposition, is the
father of itself,--of the material world, the flesh, and the devil. From
this falsehood arise the self-destroying elements of this world, its unkind
forces, its tempests, lightnings, earthquakes, poisons, rabid beasts, fatal
reptiles, and mortals.
Why are earth and mortals so elaborate in beauty, color, and form, if God
has no part in them? By the law of opposites. The most beautiful blossom is
often poisonous, and the most beautiful mansion is sometimes the home of
vice. The senses, not God, Soul, form the condition of beautiful evil, and
the supposed modes of self-conscious matter, which make a beautiful lie.
Now a lie takes its pattern from Truth, by reversing Truth. So evil and all
its forms are inverted good. God never made them; but the lie must say He
made them, or it would not be evil. Being a lie, it would be truthful to
call itself a lie; and by calling the knowledge of evil good, and greatly
to be desired, it constitutes the lie an evil.
The reality and individuality of man are good and God-made, and they are
here to be seen and demonstrated; it is only the evil belief that renders
them obscure.
Matter and evil are anti-Christian, the antipodes of Science. To say that
Mind is material, or that evil is Mind, is a misapprehension of being,--a
mistake which will die of its own delusion; for being self-contradictory,
it is also self-destructive. The harmony of man's being is not built on
such false foundations, which are no more logical, philosophical, or
scientific than would be the assertion that the rule of addition is the
rule of subtraction, and that sums done under both rules would have one
quotient.
Man's individuality is not a mortal mind or sinner; or else he has lost his
true individuality as a perfect child of God. Man's Father is not a mortal
mind and a sinner; or else the immortal and unerring Mind, God, is not his
Father; but God _is_ man's origin and loving Father, hence that saying of
Jesus, "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father,
which is in heaven."
The bright gold of Truth is dimmed by the doctrine of mind in matter.
To say there _is_ a false claim, called _sickness_, is to admit all there
is of sickness; for it is nothing but a false claim. To be healed, one must
lose sight of a false claim. If the claim be present to the thought, then
disease becomes as tangible as any reality. To regard sickness as a false
claim, is to abate the fear of it; but this does not destroy the so-called
fact of the _claim_. In order to be whole, we must be insensible to every
claim of error.
As with sickness, so is it with sin. To admit that sin has any claim
whatever, just or unjust, is to admit a dangerous fact. Hence the fact must
be denied; for if sin's claim be allowed in any degree, then sin destroys
the _at-one-ment_, or oneness with God,--a unity which sin recognizes as
its most potent and deadly enemy.
If God knows sin, even as a false claimant, then acquaintance with that
claimant becomes legitimate to mortals, and this knowledge would not be
forbidden; but God forbade man to know evil at the very beginning, when
Satan held it up before man as something desirable and a distinct addition
to human wisdom, because the knowledge of evil would make man a god,--a
representation that God both knew and admitted the dignity of evil.
Which is right,--God, who condemned the knowledge of sin and disowned its
acquaintance, or the serpent, who pushed that claim with the glittering
audacity of diabolical and sinuous logic?
Suffering from Others' Thoughts
Jesus accepted the one fact whereby alone the rule of Life can be
demonstrated,--namely, that there is no death.
In his real self he bore no infirmities. Though "a man of sorrows, and
acquainted with grief," as Isaiah says of him, he bore not _his_ sins, but
_ours_, "in his own body on the tree." "He was bruised for _our_
iniquities; ... and with his stripes we are healed."
He was the Way-shower; and Christian Scientists who would demonstrate "the
way" must keep close to his path, that they may win the prize. "The way,"
in the flesh, is the suffering which leads out of the flesh. "The way," in
Spirit, is "the way" of Life, Truth, and Love, redeeming us from the false
sense of the flesh and the wounds it bears. This threefold Messiah reveals
the self-destroying ways of error and the life-giving way of Truth.
Job's faith and hope gained him the assurance that the so-called sufferings
of the flesh are unreal. We shall learn how false are the pleasures and
pains of material sense, and behold the truth of being, as expressed in his
conviction, "Yet in my flesh shall I see God;" that is, Now and here shall
I behold God, divine Love.
The chaos of mortal mind is made the stepping-stone to the cosmos of
immortal Mind.
If Jesus suffered, as the Scriptures declare, it must have been from the
mentality of others; since all suffering comes from mind, not from matter,
and there could be no sin or suffering in the Mind which is God. Not his
own sins, but the sins of the world, "crucified the Lord of glory," and
"put him to an open shame."
Holding a quickened sense of false environment, and suffering from
mentality in opposition to Truth, are significant of that state of mind
which the actual understanding of Christian Science first eliminates and
then destroys.
In the divine order of Science every follower of Christ shares his cup of
sorrows. He also suffereth in the flesh, and from the mentality which
opposes the law of Spirit; but the divine law is supreme, for it freeth him
from the law of sin and death.
Prophets and apostles suffered from the thoughts of others. Their conscious
being was not fully exempt from physicality and the sense of sin.
Until he awakes from his delusion, he suffers least from sin who is a
hardened sinner. The hypocrite's affections must first be made to fret in
their chains; and the pangs of hell must lay hold of him ere he can change
from flesh to Spirit, become acquainted with that Love which is without
dissimulation and endureth all things. Such mental conditions as
ingratitude, lust, malice, hate, constitute the miasma of earth. More
obnoxious than Chinese stenchpots are these dispositions which offend the
spiritual sense.
Anatomically considered, the design of the material senses is to warn
mortals of the approach of danger by the pain they feel and occasion; but
as this sense disappears it foresees the impending doom and foretells the
pain. Man's refuge is in spirituality, "under the shadow of the Almighty."
The cross is the central emblem of human history. Without it there is
neither temptation nor glory. When Jesus turned and said, "Who hath touched
me?" he must have felt the influence of the woman's thought; for it is
written that he felt that "virtue had gone out of him." His pure
consciousness was discriminating, and rendered this infallible verdict; but
he neither held her error by affinity nor by infirmity, for it was detected
and dismissed.
This gospel of suffering brought life and bliss. This is earth's Bethel in
stone,--its pillow, supporting the ladder which reaches heaven.
Suffering was the confirmation of Paul's faith. Through "a thorn in the
flesh" he learned that spiritual grace was sufficient for him.
Peter rejoiced that he was found worthy to suffer for Christ; because to
suffer with him is to reign with him.
Sorrow is the harbinger of joy. Mortal throes of anguish forward the birth
of immortal being; but divine Science wipes away all tears.