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

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, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.

I call that mind free which escapes the bondage of matter, which, instead of stopping at the material universe and making it a prison wall, parses beyond it to its Author, and finds in the radiant signatures which it everywhere bears of the Infinite Spirit, helps to its own spiritual enlargement.

I call that mind free . . . which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still more of the oracle within itself, and uses instructions from abroad not to supersede but to quicken and exalt its own energies.

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I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles which it has deliberately espoused.

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I call that mind free which, through confidence in God and in the power of virtue, has cast off all fear but that of wrong-doing, which no menace or peril can enthrall, which is calm in the midst of tumults, and possesses itself though all else be lost.

I call that mind free which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat itself and copy the past, . . . which does not enslave itself to precise rules, but which forgets what is behind, listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.

I call that mind free which is jealous of its own freedom, which guards itself from being merged in others, which guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.

In fine, I call that mind free which, conscious of its affinity with God, and confiding in his promises by Jesus Christ, devotes itself faithfully to the unfolding of all its powers, which passes the bounds of time and. death, which hopes to advance forever, and which finds inexhaustible power . . . in the prospect of immortality.

How grand his conclusion, “Such is the spiritual freedom Christ came to give.”

The voice of God in behalf of the African slave still echoed in our land, when a new abolitionist swelled the keynote of universal freedom, asking a fuller acknowledgment of the rights of man as a son of God, — that the fetters, of matter be stricken from the human mind, and its freedom won, not with bayonet and blood, not through human warfare, but through Divine Science.