Chapter XIV - Recapitulation
Vapor and nothingness
481:1
other. How important, then, to choose good as the
other. How important, then, to choose good as the
reality! Man is tributary to God, Spirit, and to nothing
else. God's being is infinity, freedom, harmony, and
boundless bliss. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is,
there is liberty." Like the archpriests of yore, man is
free "to enter into the holiest," – the realm of God.
The fruit forbidden
481:7
Material sense never helps mortals to understand
Material sense never helps mortals to understand
Spirit, God. Through spiritual sense only, man com-
prehends and loves Deity. The various con-
tradictions of the Science of Mind by the ma-
terial senses do not change the unseen Truth, which re-
mains forever intact. The forbidden fruit of knowledge,
against which wisdom warns man, is the testimony of
error, declaring existence to be at the mercy of death,
and good and evil to be capable of commingling. This
is the significance of the Scripture concerning this "tree
of the knowledge of good and evil," – this growth of
material belief, of which it is said: "In the day that thou
eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Human hypotheses
first assume the reality of sickness, sin, and death, and
then assume the necessity of these evils because of their
admitted actuality. These human verdicts are the pro-
curers of all discord.
Sense and pure Soul
481:24
If Soul sins, it must be mortal. Sin has the elements
If Soul sins, it must be mortal. Sin has the elements
of self-destruction. It cannot sustain itself. If sin is
supported, God must uphold it, and this is
impossible, since Truth cannot support error.
Soul is the divine Principle of man and never sins, –
hence the immortality of Soul. In Science we learn that
it is material sense, not Soul, which sins; and it will be
found that it is the sense of sin which is lost, and not a
sinful soul. When reading the Scriptures, the substitu-