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

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 cite such a case to show the common notion of cause and effect, not 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.