Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/220

208 yields to a higher sense. Then he turns from his cups, as the startled dreamer that wakens from an incubus incurred through the pains of distorted sense. Man liking to do wrong — finding pleasure in it, and refraining from it only through fear of consequences — is neither a safe temperance man nor a reliable religionist.

Reform comes by understanding that there is no abiding pleasure in evil; and by gaining an affection for goodness according to Science, which reveals the immortal fact that neither pleasure nor pain, appetite nor passion, exists in or of matter, while the Divine Mind can and does destroy the false sense of pleasure and of fear, and all the appetites of the human mind.

The fear of punishment never made man truly honest. Moral courage is requisite to meet the wrong and proclaim the right. But how shall we reform the man who has more animal than moral courage, who has less Soul, because he has more material sense? Through my method of silent argument, convince his reason of its mistaken means for procuring happiness. Perhaps reason is his highest human faculty. Let that inform the sentiments, and awaken his dormant sense of moral obligation; and by degrees he will learn the nothingness of the pleasures of human sense, and the grandeur and bliss of a diviner sense that is superior to matter. Then he is saved.

A picture in the camera, or a face reflected in the mirror, is not the original, though resembling it. Man, in the likeness of his Creator, reflects the central light of being, the impersonal God. As there is no gender in the mirrored form, which is but a reflection, so gender belongs to God, and is in the Principle, not the body of