Page:Miscellaneous Writings.djvu/226

200 It was the consummate naturalness of Truth in the mind of Jesus, that made his healing easy and instantaneous. Jesus regarded good as the normal state of man, and evil as the abnormal; holiness, life, and health as the better representatives of God than sin, disease, and death. The master Metaphysician understood omnipotence to be All-power: because Spirit was to him All-in-all, matter was palpably an error of premise and conclusion, while God was the only substance, Life, and intelligence of man.

The apostle Paul insists on the rare rule in Christian Science that we have chosen for a text; a rule that is susceptible of proof, and is applicable to every stage and state of human existence. The divine Science of this rule is quite as remote from the general comprehension of mankind as are the so-called miracles of our Master, and for the sole reason that it is their basis. The foundational facts of Christian Science are gathered from the supremacy of spiritual law and its antagonism to every supposed material law. Christians to-day should be able to say, with the sweet sincerity of the apostle, “I take pleasure in infirmities,” — I enjoy the touch of weakness, pain, and all suffering of the flesh, because it compels me to seek the remedy for it, and to find happiness, apart from the personal senses. The holy calm of Paul's well-tried hope met no obstacle or circumstances paramount to the triumph of a reasonable faith in the omnipotence of good, involved in its divine Principle, God: the so-called pains and pleasures of matter were alike unreal to Jesus; for he regarded matter as only a vagary of mortal belief, and subdued it with this understanding.

The abstract statement that all is Mind, supports the