Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/124

112 supplying it with beautiful images of thought, and destroying the errors of sense that each day brings to a nearer tomb.

Man is not a pendulum swinging betwixt evil and good, joy and sorrow, sickness and health, life and death. Life and its faculties are unmeasured by calendars. The perfect and immortal are the eternal likeness of their Maker. Man is by no means a material germ, rising from the imperfect, and endeavoring to reach above his origin to Spirit. The stream rises no higher than its source.

Man is neither young nor old; he has neither birth nor death. He is not an animal, vegetable, or migrating mind, — passing from the mortal to the immortal, from evil to good, or from good to evil. Such admissions leap headlong into darkness and dogma. Shakespeare's poetry pictures infancy and age as helpless and non-intelligent, instead of assigning to them the grandeur and immortality of Mind.

If we derive all our conceptions of man from what is seen between the cradle and the grave, happiness and goodness can have no abiding-place in him, and the worms will rob him of all. Paul writes, “For the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”

The error of thinking that we are growing old, and the benefits of destroying that illusion, are illustrated in a sketch from the history of an English lady, published in The London Lancet.

Disappointed in love, in early years, she became insane. She lost all calculation of time. Believing that she still lived in the same hour that parted her from her lover,