Page:Science and Health.djvu/208

204 is in mortality or error; but nothing real is mortal. If matter can heal the sick, and mind cannot, it is more powerful than mind, and if God sends sickness, it is opposed to His government to heal it; and if matter produces its own conditions, it acts against itself, and will be self-destroyed. Our opposite views abuse the science of being, and give the lie to Truth. Has the clay power over the potter, is matter self-acting and independent of God, thus prior and superior to Spirit? To reap where Truth hath not sown, is to gather error; such contradictory statements as these “soweth the wind and reapeth the whirlwind.” It is belief alone or mortal man, that holds matter as God, intelligent, self-creative, and self-acting; Truth finds it unintelligent, neither living nor dying, sick nor well. God has no part in suffering, sin or death, and there is no reality where God is not. If God made man to be sick, it is right that he should be so, and wrong to heal him; man cannot if he would, and should not if he could, annul the decrees of Wisdom. If sickness is a reality, it is a condition of Truth; and do you claim that drugs can destroy a condition of Truth? But if, as is the case, sickness is but a belief, therefore but a dream and illusion, the waking must come from Truth and understanding, that alone can destroy it; and this is Christ healing the sick.

If man is at the disposal of man and matter, of drugs and worms, he is not “the image of God,” and is mortal, but mortality is not man—it is nothingness, the sooner gone the better, for reason and revelation repudiate it. Man is immortal, but he is not Intelligence in matter, else he were mortal; man is the idea of God, the