Science and Health. Mary Baker G. Eddy
] Materia medica originated in idolatry. The pagan priests inquired of their gods for prescriptions of medicine, and Apollo, their god of medicine, was also the sender of disease. Hippocrates turned from the gods of wood and stone to the vegetable and mineral gods for healing, and this was deemed progress, but it ought to be understood mythology and pagan worship still. The fate of medicine and its history should correspond with that of its god, Apollo, who was banished heaven and endured great sufferings on earth.
We must leave the rotting foundations of material systems, however time-honored, if we would gain Christ, Truth, as our savior, not in part but the whole, for the healer of the mind is the healer of the body. The varied doctrines and theories of Life and intelligence in matter are but ancient and modern mythology. Matter is but the grosser substratum of mortal mind, it is but an atheism of thought, that must go down when the science of being is understood; and in those days there will be tribulation such as has not been since the beginning of mortal thought, and earth will echo the shock when the cry goes forth, Why art thou, Truth, come hither to torment me before the time?
Ignorance, pride, and prejudice close the door on that which opens it on ideas not stereotyped. When the science of being is understood, every man will be his own physician, and Truth will be found the universal Panacea. Life demonstrates Life and not death, and nothing but the universal belief of death can make it apparent to mortal sense, and then it is real only as a dream that comes in darkness and disappears with the light.
Reasoning incorrectly leads to error of action; it is an [ 59 ] unconscious hypocrisy that science corrects with proof. There can be no hypocrisy in science, and its Principle is imperative; you cannot mock it by expecting it will forgive error. Science is a divine and not human demand, and being right it never repents or dishonors its claim by a pardon. If you understand in part the science of being you will be more spiritual and find happiness in the real resources of being and not in the unreal. The greater the error, the harder it struggles with Truth. What a pitiful sight is malice finding pleasure in revenge! What a pity that evil is a man's highest belief of good until his grasp on goodness grows stronger! Then he loses his pleasure in wickedness and is in torment, with no hope of escaping the misery his sin hath wrought until he has paid the full debt and cancelled his account with suffering. Sin is the image of the beast, effaced only by the sweat of agony. Sin is a moral madness that rushes forth to clamor with midnight and the tempest. To mortal view, or what is termed personal sense, science is presumptive in its claims. But we are all hastening to the proof that Life is only what is good; evil has no Life.
The Sadducees reasoned falsely on the resurrection, but not as blindly as the Pharisees, who would have error as immortal as Truth, and resurrect the spiritual from the material, make Life result in death, and death the producer of spiritual Life. Jesus taught that death was overcome by spiritual Life, and proved it thus. If we admit that Soul is immortal we must also admit that man is immortal; for if Spirit, Soul, could be parted from its idea there could be no self-existent Principle, and must be a moment when the Ego is unexpressed, and God and [ 60 ] man without entity. If Soul and its expression, called man, are united only for a period, and then separated by a temporary law of divorcement, to come together again at some uncertain time, and in a manner wholly unknown, we are left without a single proof of immortality. But Soul cannot be separated for an instant from the reflection of itself as Life, substance, and intelligence. All the forms of mortal thought that are called forms of matter are not more distinct or real to the so-called senses than forms that Soul produces are to spiritual understanding.
The footsteps of metaphysical science are not seen as much as felt. The “still, small voice” of Truth is uttering itself, but we are daily turning away from those utterances, else we are yielding to them and going up higher in our experiences and demonstration. To become as a little child, who is willing to leave the old for the new, makes thought receptive of the advanced idea, willing to let the old landmark disappear. The theory, doctrine or belief, pleasure, or pain of sense go into oblivion, and have a resurrection of what is clothed in shining garments. Purity is a proof of progress, for none but the pure in heart shall see God.
What we name angels are pure thoughts, winged with the inspiration of Truth and Love. They may appear to the so-called personal sense in superstitious forms, sometimes as females with wings on their backs, and they appear at the door of some sepulchre where an old belief has been buried, and the understanding has risen to give you a new and more beautiful form of thought and a higher conception of Life and its continuance. But angels are messages from God to man; they are not messengers or persons, but ideas clothed upon with [ 61 ] whatever form thought hath bestowed upon them, and these high and pure thoughts are not designed to lead us to a person, but away from personality to the Principle of our being, whither every pure and uplifting thought tends. Such messages from Spirit guide us aright, and to heed them and bid them tarry is entertaining angels unawares. To apprehend more of Truth we must put into practice the little we do understand. Truth is demonstrable when understood, and not understood until demonstrated. Truth is practical not theoretical, and when we practise what we have understood, more will be added to our understanding; but if we let the one talent mould for want of usage it will be lost.
Until the sick and the sinner realize their need of Truth that destroys all error, sickness, sin, and death, they will never be receptive of it. Truth is the attraction of Soul, and error the attraction of belief called sense. The former elevates and immortalizes; the latter debases and makes mortal. Spiritual sense is emotion, joy, fruition, understanding. What we term personal or material sense is but an alternating belief between pleasure and pain, hope and fear, life and death; that never reaches beyond the boundary of the unreal. When the real is attained, joy is not a trembler and hope a cheat. The motive to reach happiness, apart from a material sense of it that deceives, can be gained to-day; and, this point won, we have started in the right direction and commenced in the addition of metaphysical science; and “if ye would run, who shall hinder you?”
Saul of Tarsus beheld not the facts of being until his personal sense of things ceased, and that changed the man, thought took a higher stand-point then; a stand [ 62 ] more spiritual and true, whereby Paul learned the only realities of being; namely, God and his idea, Spirit and its formations.
Truth and Love create only what is fit to be eternal. And when did Truth ever destroy its own idea? God cannot destroy man, because he is the reflection of God. But mortals reflect not immortality, and a sick man or a sinner is not the image and likeness of God. Does wisdom find pleasure in drunkenness? But personal sense, mortal mind, and belief say there is pleasure in it; and you cannot make the inebriate leave his besottedness until his belief yields to a higher thought, and then he turns from his cup as the dreamer that wakes from his incubus. If mortal man would like to get drunk, and thinks there is pleasure in it, but is afraid of the consequences, he is not a safe temperance man. Fear is not a scientific protection; but to understand there is neither pleasure nor pain in the body, whence all appetites start, destroys both the fear and the appetite. The fear of punishment never made a man honest; moral courage is requisite for that. But how shall we reform the man with more animal than moral courage, who has less Soul, because he has more sense, than a faithful dog. You must convince his reason; that is, perhaps, his highest faculty above the brute, and let that inform the sentiments of the nothingness of the so-called pleasures of sense, then you have saved him.
A picture on the camera, or a face reflected from the mirror, is not its original, but is like it. Man is not God, or in Him, and God is not in man, else there would be more than the one Deity, and man would not be the reflection or the image and likeness of God. The [ 63 ] intelligence, Life, and substance of man are God, and man is but the reflection of those; all Mind is God, and his Life and substance are not separated from, but belong to the Principle of man. Gender is not reckoned from the man in the mirror, insomuch as he but reflects it. Gender belongs to the Principle, and not to the person of man, and is a form, quality, and characteristic of Mind instead of matter. What is termed mortal man is the shadow of shadows, that reflects no Principle, and is but a mortal belief, born to-day and dying to-morrow; and yet not dead, for this belief will continue until the understanding of immortal man and his Principle destroys the belief, and brings to light the real man.
Because man reflects God, he cannot be subject to birth, growth, maturity, and decay, unless the Principle that he reflects