Science and Health
with Key to The Scriptures
by Mary Baker Eddy
Chapter X - Science Of Being

 

284:1
matter? It is not rational to say that Mind is infinite,
but dwells in finiteness, – in matter, – or that matter is
infinite and the medium of Mind.
Mind never limited
284:4
If God were limited to man or matter, or if the infinite
could be circumscribed within the finite, God would be
corporeal, and unlimited Mind would seem
to spring from a limited body; but this is an
impossibility. Infinite Mind can have no starting-point,
and can return to no limit. It can never be in bonds,
nor be fully manifested through corporeality.
Material recognition impossible
284:11
Is God's image or likeness matter, or a mortal, sin,
sickness, and death? Can matter recognize Mind?
Can infinite Mind recognize matter? Can the
infinite dwell in the finite or know aught un-
like the infinite? Can Deity be known through
the material senses? Can the material senses, which re-
ceive no direct evidence of Spirit, give correct testimony
as to spiritual life, truth, and love?
284:19
The answer to all these questions must forever be in
the negative.
Our physical insensibility to Spirit
284:21
The physical senses can obtain no proof of God. They
can neither see Spirit through the eye nor hear it through
the ear, nor can they feel, taste, or smell Spirit.
Even the more subtile and misnamed ma-
terial elements are beyond the cognizance
of these senses, and are known only by the effects com-
monly attributed to them.
284:28
According to Christian Science, the only real senses
of man are spiritual, emanating from divine Mind.
Thought passes from God to man, but neither sensation
nor report goes from material body to Mind. The in-
tercommunication is always from God to His idea, man.
285:1
Matter is not sentient and cannot be cognizant of good
or of evil, of pleasure or of pain. Man's individu-
ality is not material. This Science of being obtains not
alone hereafter in what men call Paradise, but here
and now; it is the great fact of being for time and
eternity.
The human counterfeit
285:7
What, then, is the material personality which suffers,
sins, and dies? It is not man, the image and likeness
of God, but man's counterfeit, the inverted
likeness, the unlikeness called sin, sickness,
and death. The unreality of the claim that a mortal is
the true image of God is illustrated by the opposite na-
tures of Spirit and matter, Mind and body, for one is
intelligence while the other is non-intelligence.
Material misconceptions
285:15
Is God a physical personality? Spirit is not physical.
The belief that a material body is man is a false con-
ception of man. The time has come for a
finite conception of the infinite and of a ma-
terial body as the seat of Mind to give place
to a diviner sense of intelligence and its manifestations,
to the better understanding that Science gives of the
Supreme Being, or divine Principle, and idea.
Salvation is through reform
285:23
By interpreting God as a corporeal Saviour but not as
the saving Principle, or divine Love, we shall continue
to seek salvation through pardon and not
through reform, and resort to matter instead
of Spirit for the cure of the sick. As mortals
reach, through knowledge of Christian Science, a higher
sense, they will seek to learn, not from matter, but from
the divine Principle, God, how to demonstrate the Christ,
Truth, as the healing and saving power.
285:32
It is essential to understand, instead of believe, what
286:1
relates most nearly to the happiness of being. To seek
Truth through belief in a human doctrine is not to un-
derstand the infinite. We must not seek the immutable
and immortal through the finite, mutable, and mortal,
and so depend upon belief instead of demonstration, for
this is fatal to a knowledge of Science. The understand-
ing of Truth gives full faith in Truth, and spiritual un-
derstanding is better than all burnt offerings.
286:9
The Master said, "No man cometh unto the Father
[the divine Principle of being] but by me," Christ,
Life, Truth, Love; for Christ says, "I am the way."
Physical causation was put aside from first to
last by this original man, Jesus. He knew that the
divine Principle, Love, creates and governs all that
is real.
Goodness a portion of God
286:16
In the Saxon and twenty other tongues good is the term
for God. The Scriptures declare all that He
made to be good, like Himself, – good in
Principle and in idea. Therefore the spiritual
universe is good, and reflects God as He is.
Spiritual thoughts
286:21
God's thoughts are perfect and eternal, are substance
and Life. Material and temporal thoughts are human,
involving error, and since God, Spirit, is the
only cause, they lack a divine cause. The
temporal and material are not then creations of Spirit.
They are but counterfeits of the spiritual and eternal.
Transitory thoughts are the antipodes of everlasting
Truth, though (by the supposition of opposite qualities)
error must also say, "I am true." But by this saying
error, the lie, destroys itself.
286:31
Sin, sickness, and death are comprised in human ma-
terial belief, and belong not to the divine Mind. They
287:1
are without a real origin or existence. They have neither
Principle nor permanence, but belong, with all that is
material and temporal, to the nothingness of error, which
simulates the creations of Truth. All creations of Spirit
are eternal; but creations of matter must return to dust.
Error supposes man to be both mental and material.
Divine Science contradicts this postulate and maintains
man's spiritual identity.
Divine allness
287:9
We call the absence of Truth, error. Truth and error
are unlike. In Science, Truth is divine, and the infinite
God can have no unlikeness. Did God, Truth,
create error? No! "Doth a fountain send
forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?" God
being everywhere and all-inclusive, how can He be absent
or suggest the absence of omnipresence and omnipotence?
How can there be more than all?
287:17
Neither understanding nor truth accompanies error,
nor is error the offshoot of Mind. Evil calls itself some-
thing, when it is nothing. It saith, "I am man, but I am
not the image and likeness of God;" whereas the Scrip-
tures declare that man was made in God's likeness.
Error unveiled
287:22
Error is false, mortal belief; it is illusion, without spir-
itual identity or foundation, and it has no real existence.
The supposition that life, substance, and in-
telligence are in matter, or of it, is an error.
Matter is neither a thing nor a person, but merely the
objective supposition of Spirit's opposite. The five mate-
rial senses testify to truth and error as united in a mind
both good and evil. Their false evidence will finally
yield to Truth, – to the recognition of Spirit and of the
spiritual creation.
287:32
Truth cannot be contaminated by error. The state-
288:1
ment that Truth is real necessarily includes the correlated
statement, that error, Truth's unlikeness, is unreal.
The great conflict
288:3
The suppositional warfare between truth and error is
only the mental conflict between the evidence of the spir-
itual senses and the testimony of the material
senses, and this warfare between the Spirit and
flesh will settle all questions through faith in and the un-
derstanding of divine Love.
Superstition and understanding can never combine.
When the final physical and moral effects of Christian
Science are fully apprehended, the conflict between truth
and error, understanding and belief, Science and material
sense, foreshadowed by the prophets and inaugurated
by Jesus, will cease, and spiritual harmony reign. The
lightnings and thunderbolts of error may burst and flash
till the cloud is cleared and the tumult dies away in the
distance. Then the raindrops of divinity refresh the
earth. As St. Paul says: "There remaineth therefore
a rest to the people of God" (of Spirit).
The chief stones in the temple
288:20
The chief stones in the temple of Christian Science are
to be found in the following postulates: that Life is God,
good, and not evil; that Soul is sinless, not
to be found in the body; that Spirit is not, and
cannot be, materialized; that Life is not subject
to death; that the spiritual real man has no birth, no ma-
terial life, and no death.
The Christ-element
288:27
Science reveals the glorious possibilities of immortal
man, forever unlimited by the mortal senses.
The Christ-element in the Messiah made him
the Way-shower, Truth and Life.
288:31
The eternal Truth destroys what mortals seem to have
learned from error, and man's real existence as a child
289:1
of God comes to light. Truth demonstrated is eternal
life. Mortal man can never rise from the temporal debris
of error, belief in sin, sickness, and death, until he learns
that God is the only Life. The belief that life and sensa-
tion are in the body should be overcome by the under-
standing of what constitutes man as the image of God.
Then Spirit will have overcome the flesh.
Wickedness is not man
289:8
A wicked mortal is not the idea of God. He is little
else than the expression of error. To suppose that sin,
lust, hatred, envy, hypocrisy, revenge, have life
abiding in them, is a terrible mistake. Life
and life's idea, Truth and Truth's idea, never make men
sick, sinful, or mortal.
Death but an illusion
289:14
The fact that the Christ, or Truth, overcame and still
overcomes death proves the "king of terrors" to be but
a mortal belief, or error, which Truth destroys
with the spiritual evidences of Life; and this
shows that what appears to the senses to be death is but a
mortal illusion, for to the real man and the real universe
there is no death-process.
289:21
The belief that matter has life results, by the universal
law of mortal mind, in a belief in death. So man, tree,
and flower are supposed to die; but the fact remains,
that God's universe is spiritual and immortal.
Spiritual offspring
289:25
The spiritual fact and the material belief of things are
contradictions; but the spiritual is true, and therefore the
material must be untrue. Life is not in matter.
Therefore it cannot be said to pass out of mat-
ter. Matter and death are mortal illusions. Spirit and
all things spiritual are the real and eternal.
289:31
Man is not the offspring of flesh, but of Spirit, – of
Life, not of matter. Because Life is God, Life must be
290:1
eternal, self-existent. Life is the everlasting I AM, the Be-
ing who was and is and shall be, whom nothing can erase.
Death no advantage
290:3
If the Principle, rule, and demonstration of man's being
are not in the least understood before what is termed death
overtakes mortals, they will rise no higher spir-
itually in the scale of existence on account of
that single experience, but will remain as material as be-
fore the transition, still seeking happiness through a ma-
terial, instead of through a spiritual sense of life, and from
selfish and inferior motives. That Life or Mind is finite
and physical or is manifested through brain and nerves,
is false. Hence Truth comes to destroy this error and
its effects, – sickness, sin, and death. To the spiritual
class, relates the Scripture: "On such the second death
hath no power."
Future purification
290:16
If the change called death destroyed the belief in sin,
sickness, and death, happiness would be won at the mo-
ment of dissolution, and be forever permanent;
but this is not so. Perfection is gained only
by perfection. They who are unrighteous shall be un-
righteous still, until in divine Science Christ, Truth, re-
moves all ignorance and sin.
Sin is punished
290:23
The sin and error which possess us at the instant of
death do not cease at that moment, but endure until the
death of these errors. To be wholly spiritual,
man must be sinless, and he becomes thus only
when he reaches perfection. The murderer, though slain
in the act, does not thereby forsake sin. He is no more
spiritual for believing that his body died and learning that
his cruel mind died not. His thoughts are no purer until
evil is disarmed by good. His body is as material as his
mind, and vice versa.
291:1
The suppositions that sin is pardoned while unfor-
saken, that happiness can be genuine in the midst of
sin, that the so-called death of the body frees from sin,
and that God's pardon is aught but the destruction of
sin, – these are grave mistakes. We know that all will
be changed "in the twinkling of an eye," when the last
trump shall sound; but this last call of wisdom cannot
come till mortals have already yielded to each lesser call
in the growth of Christian character. Mortals need not
fancy that belief in the experience of death will awaken
them to glorified being.
Salvation and probation
291:12
Universal salvation rests on progression and probation,
and is unattainable without them. Heaven is not a local-
ity, but a divine state of Mind in which all the
manifestations of Mind are harmonious and
immortal, because sin is not there and man is
found having no righteousness of his own, but in posses-
sion of "the mind of the Lord," as the Scripture says.
291:19
"In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall
be." So we read in Ecclesiastes. This text has been
transformed into the popular proverb, "As the tree
falls, so it must lie." As man falleth asleep, so shall he
awake. As death findeth mortal man, so shall he be
after death, until probation and growth shall effect the
needed change. Mind never becomes dust. No resur-
rection from the grave awaits Mind or Life, for the grave
has no power over either.
Day of judgment
291:28
No final judgment awaits mortals, for the judgment-
day of wisdom comes hourly and continually,
even the judgment by which mortal man is di-
vested of all material error. As for spiritual error there
is none.
292:1
When the last mortal fault is destroyed, then the final
trump will sound which will end the battle of Truth with
error and mortality; "but of that day and hour, knoweth
no man." Here prophecy pauses. Divine Science alone
can compass the heights and depths of being and reveal
the infinite.
Primitive error
292:7
Truth will be to us "the resurrection and the life" only
as it destroys all error and the belief that Mind, the only
immortality of man, can be fettered by the
body, and Life be controlled by death. A sin-
ful, sick, and dying mortal is not the likeness of God, the
perfect and eternal.
292:13
Matter is the primitive belief of mortal mind, because
this so-called mind has no cognizance of Spirit. To
mortal mind, matter is substantial, and evil is
real. The so-called senses of mortals are material.
Hence the so-called life of mortals is dependent on
matter.
292:19
Explaining the origin of material man and mortal mind,
Jesus said: "Why do ye not understand my speech?
Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your
father, the devil [evil], and the lusts of your father ye will
do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode
not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When
he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar,
and the father of it."
Immortal man
292:27
This carnal material mentality, misnamed mind, is
mortal. Therefore man would be annihilated, were it
not for the spiritual real man's indissoluble
connection with his God, which Jesus brought
to light. In his resurrection and ascension, Jesus showed
that a mortal man is not the real essence of manhood, and
293:1
that this unreal material mortality disappears in presence
of the reality.
Elementary electricity
293:3
Electricity is not a vital fluid, but the least material
form of illusive consciousness, – the material mindless-
ness, which forms no link between matter and
Mind, and which destroys itself. Matter and
mortal mind are but different strata of human belief. The
grosser substratum is named matter or body; the more
ethereal is called mind. This so-called mind and body
is the illusion called a mortal, a mind in matter. In reality
and in Science, both strata, mortal mind and mortal body,
are false representatives of man.
293:13
The material so-called gases and forces are counter-
feits of the spiritual forces of divine Mind, whose potency
is Truth, whose attraction is Love, whose adhesion and
cohesion are Life, perpetuating the eternal facts of being.
Electricity is the sharp surplus of materiality which coun-
terfeits the true essence of spirituality or truth, – the
great difference being that electricity is not intelligent,
while spiritual truth is Mind.
The counterfeit forces
293:21
There is no vapid fury of mortal mind – expressed in
earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity
– and this so-called mind is self-destroyed.
The manifestations of evil, which counterfeit
divine justice, are called in the Scriptures, "The anger
of the Lord." In reality, they show the self-destruction
of error or matter and point to matter's opposite, the
strength and permanency of Spirit. Christian Science
brings to light Truth and its supremacy, universal har-
mony, the entireness of God, good, and the nothingness
of evil.
Instruments of error
293:32
The five physical senses are the avenues and instru-
294:1
ments of human error, and they correspond with error.
These senses indicate the common human belief, that life,
substance, and intelligence are a unison of
matter with Spirit. This is pantheism, and
carries within itself the seeds of all error.
294:6
If man is both mind and matter, the loss of one finger
would take away some quality and quantity of the man,
for matter and man would be one.
Mortal verdict
294:9
The belief that matter thinks, sees, or feels is not more
real than the belief that matter enjoys and suffers. This
mortal belief, misnamed man, is error, saying:
"Matter has intelligence and sensation. Nerves
feel. Brain thinks and sins. The stomach can make a
man cross. Injury can cripple and matter can kill man."
This verdict of the so-called material senses victimizes
mortals, taught, as they are by physiology and pathology,
to revere false testimony, even the errors that are destroyed
by Truth through spiritual sense and Science.
Mythical pleasure
294:19
The lines of demarcation between immortal man, repre-
senting Spirit, and mortal man, representing the error that
life and intelligence are in matter, show the
pleasures and pains of matter to be myths, and
human belief in them to be the father of mythology, in
which matter is represented as divided into intelligent gods.
Man's genuine selfhood is recognizable only in what is
good and true. Man is neither self-made nor made by
mortals. God created man.
294:28
The inebriate believes that there is pleasure in intoxica-
tion. The thief believes that he gains something by steal-
ing, and the hypocrite that he is hiding himself. The
Science of Mind corrects such mistakes, for Truth demon-
strates the falsity of error.
Severed members
295:1
The belief that a severed limb is aching in the old loca-
tion, the sensation seeming to be in nerves which
are no longer there, is an added proof of the un-
reliability of physical testimony.
Mortals unlike immortals
295:5
God creates and governs the universe, including man.
The universe is filled with spiritual ideas, which He
evolves, and they are obedient to the Mind
that makes them. Mortal mind would trans-
form the spiritual into the material, and then
recover man's original self in order to escape from the
mortality of this error. Mortals are not like immortals,
created in God's own image; but infinite Spirit being all,
mortal consciousness will at last yield to the scientific fact
and disappear, and the real sense of being, perfect and
forever intact, will appear.
Goodness transparent
295:16
The manifestation of God through mortals is as light
passing through the window-pane. The light and the
glass never mingle, but as matter, the glass
is less opaque than the walls. The mortal
mind through which Truth appears most vividly is that
one which has lost much materiality – much error – in
order to become a better transparency for Truth. Then,
like a cloud melting into thin vapor, it no longer hides
the sun.
Brainology a myth
295:25
All that is called mortal thought is made up of error.
The theoretical mind is matter, named brain, or mate-
rial consciousness, the exact opposite of real
Mind, or Spirit. Brainology teaches that
mortals are created to suffer and die. It further
teaches that when man is dead, his immortal soul is
resurrected from death and mortality. Thus error the-
orizes that spirit is born of matter and returns to mat-
296:1
ter, and that man has a resurrection from dust; whereas
Science unfolds the eternal verity, that man is the spiritual,
eternal reflection of God.
Scientific purgation
296:4
Progress is born of experience. It is the ripening of
mortal man, through which the mortal is dropped for
the immortal. Either here or hereafter, suf-
fering or Science must destroy all illusions
regarding life and mind, and regenerate material sense
and self. The old man with his deeds must be put off.
Nothing sensual or sinful is immortal. The death of a
false material sense and of sin, not the death of organic
matter, is what reveals man and Life, harmonious, real,
and eternal.
296:14
The so-called pleasures and pains of matter perish,
and they must go out under the blaze of Truth, spiritual
sense, and the actuality of being. Mortal belief must lose
all satisfaction in error and sin in order to part with
them.
296:19
Whether mortals will learn this sooner or later, and
how long they will suffer the pangs of destruction, de-
pends upon the tenacity of error.
Mixed testimony
296:22
The knowledge obtained from the corporeal senses
leads to sin and death. When the evidence of Spirit
and matter, Truth and error, seems to com-
mingle, it rests upon foundations which time
is wearing away. Mortal mind judges by the testimony
of the material senses, until Science obliterates this false
testimony. An improved belief is one step out of error,
and aids in taking the next step and in understanding
the situation in Christian Science.
Belief an autocrat
296:31
Mortal belief is a liar from the beginning, not deserving
power. It says to mortals, "You are wretched!" and they
297:1
think they are so; and nothing can change this state, until
the belief changes. Mortal belief says, "You are happy!"
and mortals are so; and no circumstance can
alter the situation, until the belief on this sub-
ject changes. Human belief says to mortals, "You are
sick!" and this testimony manifests itself on the body as
sickness. It is as necessary for a health-illusion, as for
an illusion of sickness, to be instructed out of itself into
the understanding of what constitutes health; for a change
in either a health-belief or a belief in sickness affects the
physical condition.
Self-improvement
297:12
Erroneous belief is destroyed by truth. Change the
evidence, and that disappears which before seemed real
to this false belief, and the human conscious-
ness rises higher. Thus the reality of being
is attained and man found to be immortal. The only
fact concerning any material concept is, that it is neither
scientific nor eternal, but subject to change and dis-
solution.
Faith higher than belief
297:20
Faith is higher and more spiritual than belief. It is
a chrysalis state of human thought, in which spiritual
evidence, contradicting the testimony of mate-
rial sense, begins to appear, and Truth, the
ever-present, is becoming understood. Human thoughts
have their degrees of comparison. Some thoughts are
better than others. A belief in Truth is better than a
belief in error, but no mortal testimony is founded on the
divine rock. Mortal testimony can be shaken. Until
belief becomes faith, and faith becomes spiritual under-
standing, human thought has little relation to the actual
or divine.
297:32
A mortal belief fulfils its own conditions. Sickness,
298:1
sin, and death are the vague realities of human conclu-
sions. Life, Truth, and Love are the realities of divine
Science. They dawn in faith and glow full-orbed in
spiritual understanding. As a cloud hides the sun it
cannot extinguish, so false belief silences for a while the
voice of immutable harmony, but false belief cannot de-
stroy Science armed with faith, hope, and fruition.
Truth's witness
298:8
What is termed material sense can report only a mor-
tal temporary sense of things, whereas spiritual sense can
bear witness only to Truth. To material sense,
the unreal is the real until this sense is corrected
by Christian Science.
298:13
Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, in-
volves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, real-
ity. Material sense expresses the belief that mind is in
matter. This human belief, alternating between a sense
of pleasure and pain, hope and fear, life and death, never
reaches beyond the boundary of the mortal or the unreal.
When the real is attained, which is announced by Science,
joy is no longer a trembler, nor is hope a cheat. Spirit-
ual ideas, like numbers and notes, start from Principle,
and admit no materialistic beliefs. Spiritual ideas lead
up to their divine origin, God, and to the spiritual sense
of being.
Thought-angels
298:25
Angels are not etherealized human beings, evolving
animal qualities in their wings; but they are celestial
visitants, flying on spiritual, not material,
pinions. Angels are pure thoughts from God,
winged with Truth and Love, no matter what their indi-
vidualism may be. Human conjecture confers upon angels
its own forms of thought, marked with superstitious out-
lines, making them human creatures with suggestive
299:1
feathers; but this is only fancy. It has behind it no more
reality than has the sculptor's thought when he carves
his "Statue of Liberty," which embodies his concep-
tion of an unseen quality or condition, but which has
no physical antecedent reality save in the artist's own ob-
servation and "chambers of imagery."
Our Angelic messengers
299:7
My angels are exalted thoughts, appearing at the door
of some sepulchre, in which human belief has buried
its fondest earthly hopes. With white fin-
gers they point upward to a new and glo-
rified trust, to higher ideals of life and its joys. Angels
are God's representatives. These upward-soaring beings
never lead towards self, sin, or materiality, but guide to
the divine Principle of all good, whither every real indi-
viduality, image, or likeness of God, gathers. By giving
earnest heed to these spiritual guides they tarry with us,
and we entertain "angels unawares."
Knowledge and Truth
299:18
Knowledge gained from material sense is figuratively
represented in Scripture as a tree, bearing the fruits of
sin, sickness, and death. Ought we not then
to judge the knowledge thus obtained to be
untrue and dangerous, since "the tree is known by his
fruit"?
299:24
Truth never destroys God's idea. Truth is spiritual,
eternal substance, which cannot destroy the right reflec-
tion. Corporeal sense, or error, may seem to hide Truth,
health, harmony, and Science, as the mist obscures the
sun or the mountain; but Science, the sunshine of Truth,
will melt away the shadow and reveal the celestial
peaks.
Old and new man
299:31
If man were solely a creature of the material senses,
he would have no eternal Principle and would be mutable
300:1
and mortal. Human logic is awry when it attempts
to draw correct spiritual conclusions regarding life from
matter. Finite sense has no true apprecia-
tion of infinite Principle, God, or of His infi-
nite image or reflection, man. The mirage, which makes
trees and cities seem to be where they are not, illustrates
the illusion of material man, who cannot be the image
of God.
300:9
So far as the scientific statement as to man is under-
stood, it can be proved and will bring to light the true
reflection of God – the real man, or the new man (as
St. Paul has it).
The tares and wheat
300:13
The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and
real. The mutable and imperfect never touch the im-
mutable and perfect. The inharmonious and
self-destructive never touch the harmonious
and self-existent. These opposite qualities are the tares
and wheat, which never really mingle, though (to mortal
sight) they grow side by side until the harvest; then, Sci-
ence separates the wheat from the tares, through the real-
ization of God as ever present and of man as reflecting
the divine likeness.
The divine reflection
300:23
Spirit is God, Soul; therefore Soul is not in matter. If
Spirit were in matter, God would have no representative,
and matter would be identical with God.
The theory that soul, spirit, intelligence, in-
habits matter is taught by the schools. This theory is
unscientific. The universe reflects and expresses the di-
vine substance or Mind; therefore God is seen only in the
spiritual universe and spiritual man, as the sun is seen in
the ray of light which goes out from it. God is re-
vealed only in that which reflects Life, Truth, Love, –
< Previous  |  Next >

  from page    for    pages

  for    from    to  



View & Search Options