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

In 1866, higher than the platform of human rights, I built the next staging; and built it for diviner claims, made not through code or creed, but in demonstration of “peace on earth and good-will to man.” The yoke of human codes cramps the human faculties which need freedom. I would rend asunder the cankering fetters, and give man his birthright of allegiance to his Maker.

The lame, the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the sick, the sensual, I would save from the slavery of their own beliefs, and from the educational systems of the Pharaohs who hold the children of Israel in bondage.

I saw before me the Red Sea and the wilderness, but I pressed on, through faith in Truth, trusting this strong deliverer to guide into the land of Christian Science, where fetters fall, and the rights of the Spirit-man's freedom are known and acknowledged. I saw the sick wearing out years of servitude to an unreal master, even the belief that the body governs, rather than Mind.

By universal consent mortal belief has constituted itself a law to bind mortals to sickness, sin, and death; but this custom of belief is misnamed material law, and the physician who upholds it is mistaken in his methods. The law of mortal mind, conjectural and speculative, should be void, should be trampled under foot by the higher law of immortal Mind, that created man for dominion instead of enslavement.

I saw that the law of mortal belief included all error, and must be exposed, denied, superseded; that the claims of illusion's slaves must be explained away, even as the oppressive State laws were disputed, and the slave taught his freedom.

The higher law of the Divine Mind must end human bondage, or mortals will go on as did the colored race, ignorant of their inalienable rights, and submitting to the most hopeless slavery; because their masters enforced ignorance as the accompaniment of servitude.

Let history record it, that Massachusetts succored a fugitive slave in 1853, and put her foot on a tyrannical prohibitory law, regulating the practice of medicine, in 1880. Had her sister States followed this example, and sustained our Constitution and Bill of Rights, it would have saved them from a departure from that immortal sentiment of the Declaration, “Man is endowed by his Maker with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The oppressive State statutes touching medicine remind one of those words of Madame Roland, as she knelt to a Goddess of Liberty erected upon a guillotine, “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!”

Discerning the rights of man, we cannot fail to foresee the doom of all oppression. Slavery is not the legitimate state of man. God made him free. Paul said, “I was free born.” So should all men be. Justice and Truth make free; injustice and error lead into captivity.

Divine Science grasps the standard of liberty, and cries “Follow me; escape from the bondage of sickness, sin, and death.” Jesus marked out the way. Citizens of the world, accept the glorious import of “the liberty of the sons of God,” and be free! This is your divine right. Illusion, not law, has bound you, entangled your free limbs, crippled your capacities, defaced the tablet of your mind with error, enfeebled your body.

Causation is Mind, not matter. The body but expresses mortal mind. You possess this body and you make it harmonious or discordant, according to the images of thought impressed upon it. You embrace the body in thought, and should delineate your thoughts in health, not in sickness. You should banish the thought of disease, the belief that matter holds you in mystery and slavery. As immortal, you have a perfect, indestructible form. It is belief in mortality that makes your body discordant, according to the ignorance, fear, and belief that govern it.

If God had constituted material laws to govern man, which, disobeyed, make him ill, Christ could not have disregarded those laws by healing in direct opposition to them, and in defiance of the material condition, instead of through consultation with it.

The enslavement of man is not legitimate. It will cease when the freedom and God-given dominion of man are appropriated. Mortals will some day assert their freedom in the name of Almighty God. Then they will control their own bodies, apprehending Divine Science. Dropping their beliefs, they will behold harmony as the divine reality, and discord as the material unreality.

The evidence of the senses reverses the Science of Being, and establishes a reign of discord, — the power of sin, sickness, and death; but the great facts of Life, rightly understood, will defeat this trio of errors, with all their false witnesses, and reveal the kingdom of heaven, the reign of harmony to come on earth.

The earth's diurnal rotation is invisible to personal sense, and the sun seems moving from east to west. Until this false testimony of the senses is rebuked by study, it deludes the judgment and offers false evidence.

Science, reversing appearances, corrects them by the simple rule that the greater controls the lesser. The sun is the central stillness, and the earth, turning on its axis, revolves around it. Astronomical order, imitating the action of Principle and its reflection, is nearer the spiritual fact; and it is allied to Divine Science in its method of governing man and the universe.

Mind, supreme over all its formations and governing them all, is the central sun to its own systems of ideas, the Light and Life of all its own vast creation. Man is tributary to the Divine Mind. The mortal body is not the man, and is subject to the control of error.

The optical focus is proof of the illusion of material sense. On the eye's retina sky and tree-tops apparently join hands, clouds and ocean meet and mingle. Where the finite and material drop the view, the infinite and spiritual extend and enlarge it.

The barometer, that little prophet of storm and sunshine, — denying the testimony of the senses, — points to fair weather in the midst of murky clouds and drenching rain.

To material sense the severance of the jugular vein takes away Life; but to spiritual sense, and in Science, Life goes on unchanged, being eternal. Temporal life is a false sense of existence. Science takes all evidence out of the hands of matter, and supports the substance of Spirit and the spiritual fact.

Science destroyed Ptolemy's purblind theory, that the earth is the astronomic centre, and revealed the true plan of the harmony of the spheres. Material sense, reversing the Science of Soul, would make mortal mind tributary to mortal body, and appoint certain sections of matter, such as brain, and nerves, as seats of pain and pleasure, whence matter reports to this mind its status of happiness or misery.

Our theories make the same mistake regarding Soul and body that Ptolemy made as to the solar system. They insist that Soul is in body, and Mind therefore tributary to matter. Science has destroyed the false theory as to the relations of the celestial bodies; and Science also will destroy the greater error as to our terrestrial bodies. The true idea and Principle of man will then appear.

Copernicus mapped out the stellar system; but before he spake, astrography was chaotic, and the heavenly fields unexplored. The Chaldean wise men read in the stars the fate of empires and the fortunes of men. No higher revelation than the horoscope was to them displayed upon the empyrean, but earth and heaven were still bright, and bird and blossom were glad in the sunshine.

We have goodness and beauty to gladden the heart; but man, left to the hypotheses of material sense, unexplained by Science, would be as the wandering comet or desolate star, — “a weary searcher for a viewless home.”

The Ptolemaic blunder could not affect the harmony of being, as much as the error relating to Soul and body, — which reverses the order of Science, and assigns to matter the power and prerogative of Spirit, so that man becomes the most inharmonious body of the universe.