Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/479

Rh The material man is shut out by Divine Science from the presence of God, for the five material senses cannot take cognizance of Spirit. They cannot come into His presence, and must dwell in dreamland, until mortals arrive at the understanding that material life, with all its sin, sickness, and death, is an illusion, against which Spirit is engaged in a warfare of extermination. The great verities of existence are shut out by this falsity. All error grows out of the evidence before the material senses. If man is material, and originates in an egg, who shall say that he was not primarily dust? May not Darwin be right in thinking that apehood preceded mortal manhood?

Minerals and vegetables are found, according to Divine Science, to be God's ideas, creations of thought, not of matter. Does man, whom God created with a word, originate in an egg? When Spirit made all, did it leave aught for matter to create? Ideas of Truth alone are reflected in the myriad manifestations of Life; and thus it is seen that man sprang from Mind, not from matter. The belief that matter supports Life would make Life, or God, mortal.

The text, “In the day when Jehovah God made the earth and the heavens,” introduces the record of material creation that followed the spiritual, — a creation so wholly apart from God's, that Spirit had no participation in it. In His creation earth became productive, obedient to Mind. There was no rain, and “not a man to till the ground.” Mind, instead of matter, being the producer, Life is self-sustained. Birth, decay, and death arise from the material sense of things, not the spiritual; for in the latter, Life consisteth not of the things that a man eateth.