Science and Health. Mary Baker G. Eddy
And these opposite figures never unite in symbol or Soul. The straight line can find no place in a curve, and the curve has no adjustment to the straight line; matter has no place in Spirit, and Spirit has no place in matter; Truth has no foothold in error, and error finds none in Truth; intelligence cannot pass into non-intelligence, or matter, and non-intelligence cannot become Spirit. At no point can these two opposites mingle or unite and [ 42 ] present the same phenomena; if they touch, one is still a curve and the other a straight line. But what say our theories? They insist upon Life which is God, and there is no other Life, being one and the same with that which is termed the life of matter; they speak of both error and Truth as mind, and of infinite Spirit as of finites or spirits, and of Spirit as both good and evil. Our theories claim the phenomena of life is what we term organized and structural life, such as the senses take in, as the life of the tree, the plant, and material man. This so-called vegetable and animal life, they conclude, is the manifestation of the life that God bestows. This incorrect belief regarding life deteriorates from the character or nature of Deity so essentially that we lose the true sense of God in such false estimates of what manifests Him. Misstating the divine Principle, that alone is Life, we can never demonstrate this Principle in length of days, like the patriarchs, or be governed by its divine science in Christianity, any more than we can teach and illustrate geometry by calling a curve a straight line, and a straight line a sphere.
What is termed matter cannot be substance if Spirit is substance, and Paul plainly stated in Mind “the substance of things hoped for.” Which ought to be substance to us, the erring, changing, and dying, the mutable and mortal, or the unerring, immutable, and immortal? That matter, or what is called thus, is a lawgiver, is simply a belief and error; or that there is a material law is a self-evident mistake. God being the only intelligence, unerring mind, He never made a law material for a law spiritual to annul. Jesus proved that, when walking the wave and healing the sick, in direct antagonism to what are termed laws material.
[ 43 ] We are taught that Soul sins and is lost spiritually. Then the annihilation of Soul is inevitable, for its only Life is Spirit, and if it loses this Life it hath none other, and is annihilated. If Soul sinneth it would die. Sin is the element of self-destruction, and the Scripture saith “The soul that sinneth shall die.” But Soul is Spirit, and there is no evil in Spirit, for Spirit is God, and there is but one Spirit. That which is termed mind and spirit, and is erring, sinning, and depends on matter for its manifestation, is not mind or spirit. God is not in the things He hath made, and all that He hath made is “good.” Again, God, Spirit, is the Soul or Principle of all that is real; and nothing is real that does not express God and is controlled by Him. Soul is not seen by what we name personal sense, because it is Spirit, that this sense cannot accept, and which affords no evidence of God. If Soul sinned, it would be a material manifestation that sense could see, for it is only the so-called material sense that can sin. There is neither growth, maturity, nor decay to Soul. Those are the mutations of sense, the changing clouds of mortal belief that hide the Truth of being. We call the objects of sense substance, but they are only what mortal belief names them, and only what they appear to this mortal belief. Only as we escape from a false sense of Life, substance, and intelligence, and pass from the stand-points of matter to Spirit, to gain the real and tangible, shall we find Soul, and lose all sense of sin and mortality. It is only in false estimates of Soul in sense, and mind in matter that we go wrong and stray from Spirit, and experience a temporary loss or absence of Soul. This state of error is the mortal dream of Life and substance in matter, which is directly opposite [ 44 ] to the immortal waking and reality of being, even as the straight line is the opposite of the sphere. In this waking to Life that is real, what we have learned from the senses we shall find reversed by the facts of existence. That which sense deemed shadow will be found substance, and what it called substance will become nothingness, as the dream vanishes and the reality appears. The parent of all discord was not a man, but a dream that man is material and mortal, that he originated in dust, started materially instead of spiritually. This Adam-dream of Life and intelligence originating from and passing into matter was error, and error was called a serpent, suggesting the opposite of Truth, and saying, “Error is as real as Truth,” and “Believe me and I will make ye as gods. I will have more than one Mind, I will have lords and gods many. I will have minds and spirits, and Truth shall change hands, and the opposite of Spirit and God I will name matter, and it shall seem to have Life, as much as God or Spirit that is Life.” This error resulted ill; for its life was found not life, only a transient sense of Life that ended in death. Then error charged its lie to Truth, God, and said God made man mortal, and out of matter instead of Spirit, and partook of its own evil with an amen. The eternal “Us” made man, and gave him dominion over all the earth, but God, Spirit, never created man from a material basis, or bade him obey laws that Spirit never made. God's government is the higher law of Mind—the spiritual statute, in which Mind governs instead of being governed. Jesus, understanding the spiritual law, and knowing there is no law of matter, said, “And these signs shall follow them that believe, they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly [ 45 ] thing it shall not hurt them.” But this understanding of the power of man equipped with the Spirit that is God has sadly disappeared from the history of Christianity. Our missionaries carry the Bible to Hindostan, but do they explain it as Jesus did, when hundreds are dying annually of the bite of serpents? The decision by vote of what should be deemed Holy Writ, the manifest mistakes in the Septuagint, and the thirty thousand different readings of the Old Testament, and the three hundred thousand of the New Testament, show how a mortal and material sense stole into the divine record and touched the inspired pages with its own hue. But all that could not wholly obscure the divine science of the Scriptures as seen from Genesis to Revelation, or mar the demonstration thereof by Jesus and the prophets and apostles. Those, inspired by Truth, were the only suitable recorders of it, and they must have foreseen that, but they also foresaw that “the stone which the builders rejected should again become the head of the corner.”
The most scientific man that ever trod the globe was Jesus of Nazareth; he went beyond the material sense of causation, and found the spiritual cause; he called the mortal body, that we call substance, ghost; and the body that he reproduced he called what it was before named, “flesh and bones.” Showing that to him the substance of himself was Spirit, and the body his representative, and no more perfect because of death, and no less material until his ascension; until the mind that it represented had risen above all earthly tendencies, and relinquished the belief of substance-matter, and the “I” had become one with the Father. Then it was that our Master gained the solution of being, and learned of demonstration that there is but [ 46 ] one Mind, and he had no other. The Jews who sought to kill this man of God called themselves highly religious, but they show very plainly that their material views were the parent of their wicked deeds, for when Jesus spake of reproducing his own body—knowing, as he did, that Mind was the builder—and said, “Though you destroy this temple, yet will I build it again,” they thought he referred to a material temple. To them Spirit, God, was a mere ghost, unseen and unfamiliar, and the body they had laid in a sepulchre was substance. Through this materialism they lost sight of Jesus, just as Mary the penitent saw him, when he presented more than ever the true idea of God, of Life and substance; and because of their material and sinful beliefs, this idea was imperceptible to them. The higher Jesus demonstrated divine science, and wrought the problem of being, and made upon man the demands of its Principle—Truth and Love—the more odious he became to the world of belief that depends on doctrines and material law to save them from sin and sickness, and submits to death as the inevitable, even when Jesus proved it a falsity, and said, “They that believe on me shall never see death.”
That saying of our Master, “I and Father are one,” separated him from theology and the rabbis. His better understanding of God rebuked them; he knew there was but one Mind and laid no claim to any other; he knew that the “I” was Mind instead of body, and that sin and evil were not Mind; and because of his understanding of this divine science, it brought down upon him the anathemas of the world. It was their reversed views that hid from the eyes of the rabbis Jesus' sonship with God. They could not discern spiritual being; their carnal [ 47 ] minds were at enmity with it, and their thoughts were filled with mortal error instead of God's idea as presented by Jesus. The image and likeness of God we lose sight of through sin that beclouds the spiritual sense of Truth, and regain this likeness only as we subdue sin and obtain “dominion