Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/181

Rh Mortal mind, prolific of error, sickness, sin, and death, acts and reacts, and then comes to a stop; but this error is not the actual Mind, which is the same Life, Truth, and Love, “yesterday, to-day, and forever.” Ideas rest on understanding, not on belief.

Personal sense defines disease as a reality; but the Scriptures declare that Spirit makes all, even while this personal sense is saying that matter makes disease, and Immortal Mind cannot heal it. Human sense supports all that is untrue, selfish, or debased. It would put Soul into soil, Life into limbo, and doom all things to decay. We must put to silence this lie of material sense, with the Truth of spiritual sense. We must cause the error to cease that brought sin and death, and would shut out the pure sense of omnipotence.

Is the sick man a sinner above all others? No, but he is not the idea of God, in that he is sick. Weary of their material beliefs, whence so much sorrow comes, mortals grow more spiritual, as the error (or belief that Life is in matter) yields to the hope of spiritual existence. A wicked man is not the idea of God; he is little else than error's representative. To suppose that hatred, envy, pride, malice, hypocrisy, have Life abiding in them, is a terrible mistake. Life and its idea, Truth and its idea, never made a man sick or sinful. Mortals are not like immortals, created in God's own image; yet there is enough of good, of Infinite Spirit, acknowledged by this mortal consciousness, to at last reveal the sense of being that is real and perfect, forever intact. We all look on a corpse, not as man, but simply as matter. Men say, “The body is dead;” but this death was the departure of a mortal illusion, not of matter