Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/190

178 perfect Life, or control of Soul over sense, and receive Christianity, or Truth, in its Divine Principle. This must be the climax, before harmonious and immortal man is fully understood and demonstrated. It is highly important — in view of the immense work to be accomplished before this recognition of Divine Science — to turn our thoughts in this direction, that finite belief may be prepared to relinquish its error.

If the Principle, rule, and demonstration of being are not in the least understood before what is termed death reaches us, we shall rise no higher in the scale of being at that single point of experience; but we shall remain as material as before the transition, still seeking happiness through a material instead of through a spiritual sense of Life, and through selfish and personal motives. So long as it lasts, error will incur the penalty of sickness, sin, and death; and these will continue so long as the belief remains that Life and Mind are finite in the body, and manifested through brains or nerves.

If the change called death destroyed the belief that pleasure and pain commingle and proceed from the body, happiness would be won at the moment of dissolution, and be forever permanent; but this is not so. Perfection is gained only by degrees, so that they who are “unrighteous shall be unrighteous still,” until Science remove all their ignorance and sin.

Each sin and error, possessing us at the instant of death, ceases not with the dissolution of matter, but endures till the death of the error. To be wholly spiritual man must be sinless. He becomes spiritual only as he reaches perfection. The murderer, though slain in the act, does not thereby forsake sin. He is no more spiritual