Chapter 8: 'Science and Health with Key to The Scriptures' by Mary Baker Eddy

Chapter VIII - Footsteps Of Truth

No evil in Spirit

207:1
these evils are not Spirit, for there is no evil in Spirit.

Because God is Spirit, evil becomes more apparent and

obnoxious proportionately as we advance spir-

itually, until it disappears from our lives.

This fact proves our position, for every scientific state-

ment in Christianity has its proof. Error of statement

leads to error in action.

Subordination of evil

207:8
God is not the creator of an evil mind. Indeed, evil

is not Mind. We must learn that evil is the awful decep-

tion and unreality of existence. Evil is not

supreme; good is not helpless; nor are the

so-called laws of matter primary, and the law of Spirit

secondary. Without this lesson, we lose sight of the per-

fect Father, or the divine Principle of man.

Evident impossibilities

207:15
Body is not first and Soul last, nor is evil mightier than

good. The Science of being repudiates self‑

evident impossibilities, such as the amalgama-

tion of Truth and error in cause or effect. Science sepa-

rates the tares and wheat in time of harvest.

One primal cause

207:20
There is but one primal cause. Therefore there can

be no effect from any other cause, and there can be no

reality in aught which does not proceed from

this great and only cause. Sin, sickness, dis-

ease, and death belong not to the Science of being. They

are the errors, which presuppose the absence of Truth,

Life, or Love.

207:27
The spiritual reality is the scientific fact in all things.

The spiritual fact, repeated in the action of man and the

whole universe, is harmonious and is the ideal of Truth.

Spiritual facts are not inverted; the opposite discord,

which bears no resemblance to spirituality, is not real.

The only evidence of this inversion is obtained from

208:1
suppositional error, which affords no proof of God,

Spirit, or of the spiritual creation. Material sense de-

fines all things materially, and has a finite sense of the

infinite.

Seemingly independent authority

208:5
The Scriptures say, "In Him we live, and move, and

have our being." What then is this seeming power, in-

dependent of God, which causes disease and

cures it? What is it but an error of belief, –

a law of mortal mind, wrong in every sense,

embracing sin, sickness, and death? It is the very anti-

pode of immortal Mind, of Truth, and of spiritual law.

It is not in accordance with the goodness of God's char-

acter that He should make man sick, then leave man to

heal himself; it is absurd to suppose that matter can both

cause and cure disease, or that Spirit, God, produces

disease and leaves the remedy to matter.

208:17
John Young of Edinburgh writes: "God is the father

of mind, and of nothing else." Such an utterance is

"the voice of one crying in the wilderness" of human

beliefs and preparing the way of Science. Let us learn

of the real and eternal, and prepare for the reign of

Spirit, the kingdom of heaven, – the reign and rule of

universal harmony, which cannot be lost nor remain

forever unseen.

Sickness as only thought

208:25
Mind, not matter, is causation. A material body

only expresses a material and mortal mind. A mortal

man possesses this body, and he makes it

harmonious or discordant according to the

images of thought impressed upon it. You embrace

your body in your thought, and you should delineate

upon it thoughts of health, not of sickness. You should

banish all thoughts of disease and sin and of other beliefs

209:1
included in matter. Man, being immortal, has a perfect

indestructible life. It is the mortal belief which makes

the body discordant and diseased in proportion as igno-

rance, fear, or human will governs mortals.

Allness of Truth

209:5
Mind, supreme over all its formations and governing

them all, is the central sun of its own systems of ideas,

the life and light of all its own vast creation;

and man is tributary to divine Mind. The

material and mortal body or mind is not the man.

209:10
The world would collapse without Mind, without the in-

telligence which holds the winds in its grasp. Neither

philosophy nor skepticism can hinder the march of the

Science which reveals the supremacy of Mind. The im-

manent sense of Mind-power enhances the glory of Mind.

Nearness, not distance, lends enchantment to this view.

Spiritual translation

209:16
The compounded minerals or aggregated substances

composing the earth, the relations which constituent

masses hold to each other, the magnitudes,

distances, and revolutions of the celestial

bodies, are of no real importance, when we remember

that they all must give place to the spiritual fact by the

translation of man and the universe back into Spirit. In

proportion as this is done, man and the universe will be

found harmonious and eternal.

209:25
Material substances or mundane formations, astro-

nomical calculations, and all the paraphernalia of specu-

lative theories, based on the hypothesis of material law

or life and intelligence resident in matter, will ulti-

mately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite calculus of

Spirit.

209:31
Spiritual sense is a conscious, constant capacity to un-

derstand God. It shows the superiority of faith by works

210:1
over faith in words. Its ideas are expressed only in "new

tongues;" and these are interpreted by the translation of

the spiritual original into the language which human

thought can comprehend.

Jesus' disregard of matter

210:5
The Principle and proof of Christianity are discerned

by spiritual sense. They are set forth in Jesus' demon-

strations, which show – by his healing the

sick, casting out evils, and destroying death,

"the last enemy that shall be destroyed," –

his disregard of matter and its so-called laws.

210:11
Knowing that Soul and its attributes were forever

manifested through man, the Master healed the sick,

gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, feet to the

lame, thus bringing to light the scientific action of the

divine Mind on human minds and bodies and giving

a better understanding of Soul and salvation. Jesus

healed sickness and sin by one and the same metaphysical

process.

Mind not mortal

210:19
The expression mortal mind is really a solecism, for

Mind is immortal, and Truth pierces the error of mortality

as a sunbeam penetrates the cloud. Because,

in obedience to the immutable law of Spirit,

this so-called mind is self-destructive, I name it mortal.

Error soweth the wind and reapeth the whirlwind.

Matter mindless

210:25
What is termed matter, being unintelligent, cannot say,

"I suffer, I die, I am sick, or I am well." It is the so‑

called mortal mind which voices this and ap-

pears to itself to make good its claim. To

mortal sense, sin and suffering are real, but immortal

sense includes no evil nor pestilence. Because immortal

sense has no error of sense, it has no sense of error; there-

fore it is without a destructive element.

211:1
If brain, nerves, stomach, are intelligent, – if they talk

to us, tell us their condition, and report how they feel, –

then Spirit and matter, Truth and error, commingle

and produce sickness and health, good and evil, life and

death; and who shall say whether Truth or error is the

greater?

Matter sensationless

211:7
The sensations of the body must either be the sensa-

tions of a so-called mortal mind or of matter. Nerves

are not mind. Is it not provable that Mind is

not mortal and that matter has no sensation?

Is it not equally true that matter does not appear in the

spiritual understanding of being?

211:13
The sensation of sickness and the impulse to sin seem

to obtain in mortal mind. When a tear starts, does not

this so-called mind produce the effect seen in the lachry-

mal gland? Without mortal mind, the tear could not

appear; and this action shows the nature of all so-called

material cause and effect.

211:19
It should no longer be said in Israel that "the fathers

have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set

on edge." Sympathy with error should disappear. The

transfer of the thoughts of one erring mind to another,

Science renders impossible.

Nerves painless

211:24
If it is true that nerves have sensation, that matter has

intelligence, that the material organism causes the eyes to

see and the ears to hear, then, when the body

is dematerialized, these faculties must be lost,

for their immortality is not in Spirit; whereas the fact

is that only through dematerialization and spiritualiza-

tion of thought can these faculties be conceived of as

immortal.

211:32
Nerves are not the source of pain or pleasure. We

212:1
suffer or enjoy in our dreams, but this pain or pleasure

is not communicated through a nerve. A tooth which has

been extracted sometimes aches again in belief, and the

pain seems to be in its old place. A limb which has been

amputated has continued in belief to pain the owner. If

the sensation of pain in the limb can return, can be pro-

longed, why cannot the limb reappear?

212:8
Why need pain, rather than pleasure, come to this mor-

tal sense? Because the memory of pain is more vivid

than the memory of pleasure. I have seen an unwitting

attempt to scratch the end of a finger which had been cut

off for months. When the nerve is gone, which we say

was the occasion of pain, and the pain still remains, it

proves sensation to be in the mortal mind, not in matter.

Reverse the process; take away this so-called mind instead

of a piece of the flesh, and the nerves have no sensation.

Human falsities

212:17
Mortals have a modus of their own, undirected and un-

sustained by God. They produce a rose through seed and

soil, and bring the rose into contact with the

olfactory nerves that they may smell it. In

legerdemain and credulous frenzy, mortals believe that

unseen spirits produce the flowers. God alone makes

and clothes the lilies of the field, and this He does by

means of Mind, not matter.

No miracles in Mind-methods

212:25
Because all the methods of Mind are not understood,

we say the lips or hands must move in order to convey

thought, that the undulations of the air convey

sound, and possibly that other methods involve

so-called miracles. The realities of being, its

normal action, and the origin of all things are unseen to

mortal sense; whereas the unreal and imitative move-

ments of mortal belief, which would reverse the immortal

213:1
modus and action, are styled the real. Whoever con-

tradicts this mortal mind supposition of reality is called

a deceiver, or is said to be deceived. Of a man it has

been said, "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he;" hence

as a man spiritually understandeth, so is he in truth.

Good indefinable

213:6
Mortal mind conceives of something as either liquid

or solid, and then classifies it materially. Immortal and

spiritual facts exist apart from this mortal and

material conception. God, good, is self-exist-

ent and self-expressed, though indefinable as a whole.

Every step towards goodness is a departure from materi-

ality, and is a tendency towards God, Spirit. Material

theories partially paralyze this attraction towards infinite

and eternal good by an opposite attraction towards the

finite, temporary, and discordant.

213:16
Sound is a mental impression made on mortal belief.

The ear does not really hear. Divine Science reveals

sound as communicated through the senses of Soul –

through spiritual understanding.

Music, rhythm of head and heart

213:20
Mozart experienced more than he expressed. The

rapture of his grandest symphonies was never heard. He

was a musician beyond what the world knew.

This was even more strikingly true of Beet-

hoven, who was so long hopelessly deaf. Men-

tal melodies and strains of sweetest music supersede con-

scious sound. Music is the rhythm of head and heart.

Mortal mind is the harp of many strings, discoursing

either discord or harmony according as the hand, which

sweeps over it, is human or divine.

Before human knowledge dipped to its depths into a

false sense of things, – into belief in material origins

which discard the one Mind and true source of being, –

214:1
it is possible that the impressions from Truth were as

distinct as sound, and that they came as sound to the

primitive prophets. If the medium of hearing is wholly

spiritual, it is normal and indestructible.

214:5
If Enoch's perception had been confined to the evidence

before his material senses, he could never have "walked

with God," nor been guided into the demonstration of

life eternal.

Adam and the senses

214:9
Adam, represented in the Scriptures as formed from

dust, is an object-lesson for the human mind. The mate-

rial senses, like Adam, originate in matter and

return to dust, – are proved non-intelligent.

They go out as they came in, for they are still the error,

not the truth of being. When it is learned that the spirit-

ual sense, and not the material, conveys the impressions

of Mind to man, then being will be understood and found

to be harmonious.

Idolatrous illusions

214:18
We bow down to matter, and entertain finite thoughts

of God like the pagan idolater. Mortals are inclined to

fear and to obey what they consider a material

body more than they do a spiritual God. All

material knowledge, like the original "tree of knowledge,"

multiplies their pains, for mortal illusions would rob God,

slay man, and meanwhile would spread their table with

cannibal tidbits and give thanks.

The senses of Soul

214:26
How transient a sense is mortal sight, when a wound on

the retina may end the power of light and lens! But the

real sight or sense is not lost. Neither age nor

accident can interfere with the senses of Soul,

and there are no other real senses. It is evident that the

body as matter has no sensation of its own, and there is no

oblivion for Soul and its faculties. Spirit's senses are with-

215:1
out pain, and they are forever at peace. Nothing can hide

from them the harmony of all things and the might and

permanence of Truth.

Real being never lost

215:4
If Spirit, Soul, could sin or be lost, then being and im-

mortality would be lost, together with all the faculties of

Mind; but being cannot be lost while God ex-

ists. Soul and matter are at variance from the

very necessity of their opposite natures. Mortals are

unacquainted with the reality of existence, because matter

and mortality do not reflect the facts of Spirit.

215:11
Spiritual vision is not subordinate to geometric alti-

tudes. Whatever is governed by God, is never for an

instant deprived of the light and might of intelligence

and Life.

Light and darkness

215:15
We are sometimes led to believe that darkness is as real

as light; but Science affirms darkness to be only a mortal

sense of the absence of light, at the coming of

which darkness loses the appearance of reality.

So sin and sorrow, disease and death, are the suppositional

absence of Life, God, and flee as phantoms of error before

truth and love.

215:22
With its divine proof, Science reverses the evidence of

material sense. Every quality and condition of mortality

is lost, swallowed up in immortality. Mortal man is the

antipode of immortal man in origin, in existence, and in his

relation to God.

Faith of Socrates

215:27
Because he understood the superiority and immor-

tality of good, Socrates feared not the hemlock poison.

Even the faith of his philosophy spurned phys-

ical timidity. Having sought man's spiritual

state, he recognized the immortality of man. The igno-

rance and malice of the age would have killed the vener-

216:1
able philosopher because of his faith in Soul and his in-

difference to the body.

The serpent of error

216:3
Who shall say that man is alive to-day, but may be dead

to-morrow? What has touched Life, God, to such

strange issues? Here theories cease, and Sci-

ence unveils the mystery and solves the prob-

lem of man. Error bites the heel of truth, but cannot kill

truth. Truth bruises the head of error – destroys error.

Spirituality lays open siege to materialism. On which

side are we fighting?

Servants and masters

216:11
The understanding that the Ego is Mind, and that

there is but one Mind or intelligence, begins at once to

destroy the errors of mortal sense and to supply

the truth of immortal sense. This understand-

ing makes the body harmonious; it makes the nerves,

bones, brain, etc., servants, instead of masters. If man

is governed by the law of divine Mind, his body is in sub-

mission to everlasting Life and Truth and Love. The

great mistake of mortals is to suppose that man, God's

image and likeness, is both matter and Spirit, both good

and evil.

216:22
If the decision were left to the corporeal senses, evil

would appear to be the master of good, and sickness to

be the rule of existence, while health would seem the

exception, death the inevitable, and life a paradox. Paul

asked: "What concord hath Christ with Belial?" (2 Cor-

inthians vi. 15.)

Personal identity

216:28
When you say, "Man's body is material," I say with

Paul: Be "willing rather to be absent from the body,

and to be present with the Lord." Give up

your material belief of mind in matter, and

have but one Mind, even God; for this Mind forms its

217:1
own likeness. The loss of man's identity through the

understanding which Science confers is impossible; and

the notion of such a possibility is more absurd than to

conclude that individual musical tones are lost in the

origin of harmony.

Paul's experience

217:6
Medical schools may inform us that the healing work

of Christian Science and Paul's peculiar Christian con-

version and experience, – which prove Mind

to be scientifically distinct from matter, – are

indications of unnatural mental and bodily conditions,

even of catalepsy and hysteria; yet if we turn to the Scrip-

tures, what do we read? Why, this: "If a man keep my

saying, he shall never see death!" and "Henceforth know

we no man after the flesh!"

Fatigue is mental

217:15
That scientific methods are superior to others, is

seen by their effects. When you have once conquered

a diseased condition of the body through

Mind, that condition never recurs, and you

have won a point in Science. When mentality gives

rest to the body, the next toil will fatigue you less, for

you are working out the problem of being in divine meta-

physics; and in proportion as you understand the con-

trol which Mind has over so-called matter, you will be

able to demonstrate this control. The scientific and

permanent remedy for fatigue is to learn the power of

Mind over the body or any illusion of physical weariness,

and so destroy this illusion, for matter cannot be weary

and heavy-laden.

217:29
You say, "Toil fatigues me." But what is this me!

Is it muscle or mind? Which is tired and so speaks?

Without mind, could the muscles be tired? Do the

muscles talk, or do you talk for them? Matter is non‑

218:1
intelligent. Mortal mind does the false talking, and that

which affirms weariness, made that weariness.

Mind never weary

218:3
You do not say a wheel is fatigued; and yet the body

is as material as the wheel. If it were not for what the

human mind says of the body, the body, like

the inanimate wheel, would never be weary.

The consciousness of Truth rests us more than hours of

repose in unconsciousness.

Coalition of sin and sickness

218:9
The body is supposed to say, "I am ill." The reports

of sickness may form a coalition with the reports of sin,

and say, "I am malice, lust, appetite, envy,

hate." What renders both sin and sickness

difficult of cure is, that the human mind is the

sinner, disinclined to self-correction, and believing that

the body can be sick independently of mortal mind and

that the divine Mind has no jurisdiction over the body.

Sickness akin to sin

218:17
Why pray for the recovery of the sick, if you are with-

out faith in God's willingness and ability to heal them?

If you do believe in God, why do you sub-

stitute drugs for the Almighty's power, and

employ means which lead only into material ways of

obtaining help, instead of turning in time of need to

God, divine Love, who is an ever-present help?

218:24
Treat a belief in sickness as you would sin, with sudden

dismissal. Resist the temptation to believe in matter as

intelligent, as having sensation or power.

218:27
The Scriptures say, "They that wait upon the Lord

. . . shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk,

and not faint." The meaning of that passage is not

perverted by applying it literally to moments of fatigue,

for the moral and physical are as one in their results.

When we wake to the truth of being, all disease,

219:1
pain, weakness, weariness, sorrow, sin, death, will be

unknown, and the mortal dream will forever cease. My

method of treating fatigue applies to all bodily ailments,

since Mind should be, and is, supreme, absolute, and

final.

Affirmation and result

219:6
In mathematics, we do not multiply when we should

subtract, and then say the product is correct. No more

can we say in Science that muscles give strength,

that nerves give pain or pleasure, or that matter

governs, and then expect that the result will be harmony.

Not muscles, nerves, nor bones, but mortal mind makes

the whole body "sick, and the whole heart faint;" whereas

divine Mind heals.

219:14
When this is understood, we shall never affirm concern-

ing the body what we do not wish to have manifested. We

shall not call the body weak, if we would have it strong;

for the belief in feebleness must obtain in the human

mind before it can be made manifest on the body, and

the destruction of the belief will be the removal of its

effects. Science includes no rule of discord, but governs

harmoniously. "The wish," says the poet, "is ever father

to the thought."

Scientific beginning

219:23
We may hear a sweet melody, and yet misunderstand

the science that governs it. Those who are healed

through metaphysical Science, not compre-

hending the Principle of the cure, may misun-

derstand it, and impute their recovery to change of air or

diet, not rendering to God the honor due to Him alone.

Entire immunity from the belief in sin, suffering, and

death may not be reached at this period, but we may look

for an abatement of these evils; and this scientific begin-

ning is in the right direction.

Hygiene ineffectual

220:1
We hear it said: "I exercise daily in the open air. I

take cold baths, in order to overcome a predisposition to

take cold; and yet I have continual colds,

catarrh, and cough." Such admissions ought

to open people's eyes to the inefficacy of material hygiene,

and induce sufferers to look in other directions for cause

and cure.

220:8
Instinct is better than misguided reason, as even na-

ture declares. The violet lifts her blue eye to greet the

early spring. The leaves clap their hands as nature's

untired worshippers. The snowbird sings and soars

amid the blasts; he has no catarrh from wet feet, and

procures a summer residence with more ease than a na-

bob. The atmosphere of the earth, kinder than the at-

mosphere of mortal mind, leaves catarrh to the latter.

Colds, coughs, and contagion are engendered solely by

human theories.

The reflex phenomena

220:18
Mortal mind produces its own phenomena, and then

charges them to something else, – like a kitten

glancing into the mirror at itself and thinking

it sees another kitten.

220:22
A clergyman once adopted a diet of bread and water

to increase his spirituality. Finding his health failing,

he gave up his abstinence, and advised others never to

try dietetics for growth in grace.

Volition far-reaching

220:26
The belief that either fasting or feasting makes men

better morally or physically is one of the fruits of "the

tree of the knowledge of good and evil," con-

cerning which God said, "Thou shalt not eat

of it." Mortal mind forms all conditions of the mortal

body, and controls the stomach, bones, lungs, heart, blood,

etc., as directly as the volition or will moves the hand.

Starvation and dyspepsia

221:1
I knew a person who when quite a child adopted the

Graham system to cure dyspepsia. For many years, he

ate only bread and vegetables, and drank noth-

ing but water. His dyspepsia increasing, he

decided that his diet should be more rigid, and

thereafter he partook of but one meal in twenty-four

hours, this meal consisting of only a thin slice of bread

without water. His physician also recommended that

he should not wet his parched throat until three hours

after eating. He passed many weary years in hunger

and weakness, almost in starvation, and finally made up

his mind to die, having exhausted the skill of the doctors,

who kindly informed him that death was indeed his only

alternative. At this point Christian Science saved him,

and he is now in perfect health without a vestige of the

old complaint.

221:17
He learned that suffering and disease were the self‑

imposed beliefs of mortals, and not the facts of being;

that God never decreed disease, – never ordained a law

that fasting should be a means of health. Hence semi‑

starvation is not acceptable to wisdom, and it is equally

far from Science, in which being is sustained by God, Mind.

These truths, opening his eyes, relieved his stomach, and

he ate without suffering, "giving God thanks;" but he

never enjoyed his food as he had imagined he would

when, still the slave of matter, he thought of the flesh-

pots of Egypt, feeling childhood's hunger and undisci-

plined by self-denial and divine Science.

Mind and stomach

221:29
This new-born understanding, that neither food nor

the stomach, without the consent of mortal

mind, can make one suffer, brings with it an-

other lesson, – that gluttony is a sensual illusion, and

222:1
that this phantasm of mortal mind disappears as we better

apprehend our spiritual existence and ascend the ladder

of life.

222:4
This person learned that food affects the body only

as mortal mind has its material methods of working, one

of which is to believe that proper food supplies nutriment

and strength to the human system. He learned also that

mortal mind makes a mortal body, whereas Truth re-

generates this fleshly mind and feeds thought with the

bread of Life.

222:11
Food had less power to help or to hurt him after he

had availed himself of the fact that Mind governs man,

and he also had less faith in the so-called pleasures and

pains of matter. Taking less thought about what he

should eat or drink, consulting the stomach less about

the economy of living and God more, he recovered

strength and flesh rapidly. For many years he had

been kept alive, as was believed, only by the strictest ad-

herence to hygiene and drugs, and yet he continued ill

all the while. Now he dropped drugs and material

hygiene, and was well.

222:22
He learned that a dyspeptic was very far from being

the image and likeness of God, – far from having "do-

minion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the

air, and over the cattle," if eating a bit of animal flesh

could overpower him. He finally concluded that God

never made a dyspeptic, while fear, hygiene, physiology,

and physics had made him one, contrary to His commands.

Life only in Spirit

222:29
In seeking a cure for dyspepsia consult matter not at

all, and eat what is set before you, "asking

no question for conscience sake." We must

destroy the false belief that life and intelligence are in

223:1
matter, and plant ourselves upon what is pure and per-

fect. Paul said, "Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not

fulfil the lust of the flesh." Sooner or later we shall learn

that the fetters of man's finite capacity are forged by the

illusion that he lives in body instead of in Soul, in matter

instead of in Spirit.

Soul greater than body

223:7
Matter does not express Spirit. God is infinite omni-

present Spirit. If Spirit is all and is everywhere, what

and where is matter? Remember that truth

is greater than error, and we cannot put the

greater into the less. Soul is Spirit, and Spirit is greater

than body. If Spirit were once within the body, Spirit

would be finite, and therefore could not be Spirit.

The question of the ages

223:14
The question, "What is Truth," convulses the world.

Many are ready to meet this inquiry with the assurance

which comes of understanding; but more are

blinded by their old illusions, and try to "give

it pause." "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into

the ditch."

223:20
The efforts of error to answer this question by some

ology are vain. Spiritual rationality and free thought ac-

company approaching Science, and cannot be put down.

They will emancipate humanity, and supplant unscientific

means and so-called laws.

Heralds of Science

223:25
Peals that should startle the slumbering thought from

its erroneous dream are partially unheeded; but the last

trump has not sounded, or this would not be

so. Marvels, calamities, and sin will much

more abound as truth urges upon mortals its resisted

claims; but the awful daring of sin destroys sin, and

foreshadows the triumph of truth. God will over-

turn, until "He come whose right it is." Longevity

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