Mary Baker Eddy - Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

When Homer sang of the Grecian gods, Olympus was dark; but through his verse the gods became alive in a nation's belief. Pagan worship began with muscularity, but the Law of Sinai lifted thought into the song of David. Moses advanced a nation to the worship of God in Mind instead of matter, and illustrated the grand human capacities of being bestowed by Immortal Mind. The Psalmist said: “Thou madest man to have dominion over the works of Thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet.”

Table of Contents

And thy best reason for aught is this, — thou, Lord, wouldst have it so. — Tupper.

The best sermon ever preached is Truth's practice, healing sickness and destroying sin. Knowing that one affection will be supreme in us, and take the lead of our lives, the Master said, “Ye cannot serve two masters.”

Christian Science must be accepted, at this period, by induction. We admit the whole because a part is proven, and that part illustrates and proves the entire Principle. The Science should be taught by one morally advanced and spiritually endowed, for it is not superficial, nor is it seen from the standpoint of the human senses. Only by the illumination of the spiritual sense can the light of understanding be thrown upon this Science, that reverses the evidence before the material senses, and furnishes the right interpretation of God and man.

Although this volume contains the whole Science of Mind-healing, never think that you can gather its entire meaning by simply perusing my text-book. My personal instructions plant you more gently on its spiritual basis, and lift you more firmly above the perishing fossils of old beliefs, that you may grasp the far-off and unattained.

We must tear down before we can build; and demolishing, rather than building, belongs to the work of teaching new truths. I have endeavored to make this work the Æsculapius of Mind, that it may give hope to the sick, and heal them, although they know not how. This is the effect of Truth, even when not wholly understood.

Mental Science was a new revelation to myself when, teaching its grand truths, I had (along with them) to impart also the hue of spiritual ideas from my own spiritual condition, and do this through the meagre channel afforded by language. The Truth makes a new creation, whereby old things pass away and “all things become new.” Passions, selfishness, appetites, — all sensuality, — yield to spirituality, and the superabundance of being is on the side of God. Christian perfection is won on no other basis. The scientific unity which exists between God and man must be wrought out in life-practice, and God's will be universally done.

If they would bring to bear upon the study of the Science of Mind half the faith they have in the so-called pains and pleasures of material sense, men would not go on from immorality to immorality, until disciplined by the prison and the scaffold, but the whole human family would be redeemed by the merits of Christ. For this glorious result Jesus strove, that man might be blessed by Divine knowing.

Outside of this Science all is unstable error; but, when in accord with the Principle of his being, man neither sins nor suffers. The days of our earthly pilgrimage should multiply instead of diminish; this travelling should be towards life instead of death; and as we journey, we should develop more and more the infinite capacities of humanity, which endow it with the supreme control of the earth.

Grafting holiness upon unholiness, and opining that sin is forgiven when it is not destroyed, is as foolish as straining out gnats and swallowing camels. Our beliefs about a Supreme Being, and the practice growing out of them, are contradictory. We admit that God hath almighty power, is a “present help in time of trouble,” and yet we rely on a drug to heal disease, as if senseless matter had more power than sensible Spirit.

Common opinion admits that a man may take cold in the act of doing good, that evil can trespass on Love's domain. The Science of Christianity endows Spirit with omnipotence, assigns rewards to righteousness, and denies that matter can create or destroy.

Error abounds where truth should much more abound. If God were understood, instead of merely believed, this faith would establish health. The accusation of the rabbis, “He maketh himself as God,” was the justification of Christ, for to the Christian there is no other self than God. This thought incites the more exalted worship of self-abnegation. Spiritual perception brings out the possibilities of being, and destroys reliance on aught but God, so making man the image of his Maker in deed and in Truth.

We are prone to believe either in more than one Supreme Ruler, or in some power less than God. We imagine that Mind can be imprisoned in a sensuous body. We try to believe, when the body (in God's keeping) has gone to ruin, overmastered omnipotence, and destroyed itself, that then the deathless Principle or Soul may escape from it.

But God has no need to kill a man in order to draw him to Himself, for God Himself is the Life. He is at once the centre and circumference of being. The good we think and do, the virtue we call manhood, — these qualities are real, and reflect 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.