Chapter III - Spirit and Matter
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personal sense, otherwise error will continue until the
personal sense, otherwise error will continue until the
awakening comes with the tortures of "the rich man,"
and the dream of Life in matter ends in suffering, thus
proving itself error.
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Life is harmony and immortality, impossible to har-
Life is harmony and immortality, impossible to har-
ness to sickness, discord, and death. Love is universal
goodness and blessedness, that mixes not with suffering
and sin. Truth is infinite understanding, without an
error to obscure its perfect peace, and these three are
one in Soul, but many to sense; then do you lose hap-
piness or caste by finding yourself Soul, instead of
sense. Material man loses his individuality, but the
spiritual, never; his identity is as immortal as the Soul
of man. The man of personal sense loses his identity
with all its pleasures and pains, but the man of Soul
possesses his individuality on this safe platform, to wit:
that there is no personality; being is spirit.
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Man gives neither shape or comeliness to beauty;
Man gives neither shape or comeliness to beauty;
it has these before he perceives them; distinct outline,
coloring, etc., are of Soul, else their idea were not
given in the universe and man; therefore, beauty is a
thing of Life, the offspring of Intelligence, and not mat-
ter. The world would collapse without Intelligence
and its idea; there is no chance for argument here,
philosophy nor skepticism can change the scientific
fact that God is and was; and that man, His reflex
shadow is, and was forever. We find no diminution of
happiness in learning we are Spirit and not matter,
Soul and not body; but a vast increase of all that ele-
vates, purifies, and blesses man. Sickness, sin, and
death are all that is mortal, and these come only from
ignorance, that clings to personal sense and silences
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the voice of Soul; therefore science reveals the so‑
the voice of Soul; therefore science reveals the so‑
called pleasures or pains of personal sense, illusion, and
that there is no sensation in matter; the opposite belief
that denies this is not the utterance of man's Principle,
not the true tone, but the discord. Spirit is concord,
matter discord. If it was understood that Life is
Wisdom, Truth and Love, and not sickness, sin, and
death, things of sense, man would be immortal, and
spared the experience of sin. We find the so-called
pleasures of sense nearly unknown in infancy, and well
nigh lost in age; showing us at both extremities they
are nothingness – things of belief alone. Nutriment,
one of the parent's beliefs of personal sense, that is first
transmitted to their offspring, is nothing but instinct in
infancy, instead of pleasure, for appetites and their grat-
ification grow through education into many demands,
that instinct forbids. In both biped and quadruped
we find belief develops only error, and that instinct is
better than reason misguided. Birds, governed by in-
stinct, sing and soar; drenched with the shower, they
dry their plumage without having catarrhs, or wetting
their feet, are not victims of pulmonary disease; instinct
procures them summer residences, even with less diffi-
culty than wealth affords.
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Every pleasure we lay up in the storehouse of per-
Every pleasure we lay up in the storehouse of per-
sonal sense, is lost; sickness, sin, or death, destroys it;
but joys of Soul are laid up in the immortal storehouse
of spiritual sense, where thieves cannot break through
and steal. A happy Spirit (and there is none other,)
is independent of circumstances, accident, or age; optic
nerves never robbed it of light, nor a broken bone of
limbs, nor disease of a sound body. Matter may break