Chapter III - Spirit and Matter
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unalterable Truth? or if God can heal the sick and does
unalterable Truth? or if God can heal the sick and does
not, wherefore should man presume to do it. The error
of sickness ought to be as apparent as the error of sin.
When a man is sick, has God made him sick? No!
Can He heal him? Yes. But does He that creates
wisely destroy his own creation, or what are we to
conclude? "That all things were made by Him, and
without Him there was nothing made that was made";
in other words, that all that he created was "good,"
and what is not good has no creation, and therefore no
reality. To really understand that pleasure and pain
belong not to matter, heals the sick. Cold, heat, exer-
cise, study, food, infection, etc., etc., never caused a sick
nor a healthy condition of man. Nerves, brain, blood,
bones, liver, lungs, heart, etc., never determined the
Life of man; scrofula, fever, consumption, rheumatism,
small-pox, or any other disease never produced pain or
inharmony; not one of these can make a single hair
white or black, mar or change the creation of God;
they are not creators in the smallest sense. If God
produced disease, it is good, for all was good that God
made.
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Mortal man is improved, oftentimes, by sickness
Mortal man is improved, oftentimes, by sickness
because it is error destroying itself; a fermenting stage
in which it throws itself off to some extent; again what
is named dying is but one belief destroying another;
a belief of death destroying a belief of Life in matter.
Belief saith an ulcer becomes more painful as it has-
tens to its end in suppuration, for error grows more
imperative before it kills itself. Death is but a chem-
ical change, in which some disease that is supposed to
kill a man, reaches its own self-destruction; and we
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admit certain diseases, such as measles, whooping-cough,
admit certain diseases, such as measles, whooping-cough,
etc., never recur a second time; even thus when we
say consumption has killed a man, he has only wakened
out of the dream of Life in matter, that was never a
reality, to live on as before, and find himself not dead,
and consumption beaten ever thereafter. This is just
what Truth finally does with all sickness, sin and
death; lets them prove their own nothingness, that the
science of being may appear. Man is not dead when
the body mortal is admitted lifeless; the Life of man
was never in the body, and to admit this, is the first
step towards immortality. Heaven, earth, and man, all
the eye seeth, will pass away, and personal sense yield
to spiritual sense, which is the only real sense; and
the supposed life of matter, to Life that is God. To
understand that Spirit and its immortal idea, the uni-
verse and man, are all that is real, is the kingdom or
reign of harmony that is to come. The only reality of
Life or Substance, is Spirit.
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The different phases of error, or mortal belief, are
The different phases of error, or mortal belief, are
the conception, birth, and death of man and matter,
together with the pleasure, pain, sickness and sin of
personal sense; all of which are discords, and harmony
proves discord not the Truth of man. Once under-
standing the nothingness of error, we should never again
regard it with fear or submit to its false government.
Sin is the strongest error, because it embraces a belief
of pleasure in matter, that a belief of suffering alone
can destroy. Wisdom allows sin to commit suicide.
That sickness, sin and death are error and illusion,
and that the happiness and Life of man are undisturbed
by this error, is science. We should not regard our