Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/480

468 Matter cannot change the eternal fact that man exists because God is, and nothing is new to the Infinite Mind.

In Science Mind neither produces matter, nor does matter produce Mind. No mortal mind has the right or power to create or to destroy. All is in the hands of the One Mind, even God. The first statement about evil, and the first suggestion of more than the One Mind, is in the fable of the Serpent. The facts of creation, as previously recorded, include nothing of the kind.

The Serpent is supposed to say, “Ye shall be as gods;” but these gods must be evolved from materiality, and be the very antipodes of immortal and spiritual personality. Man is the likeness of Spirit; but a material personality is not this likeness. Therefore man, in this allegory, is neither a lower god, nor the image and likeness of the One God.

Erroneous belief reverses every position of understanding and Truth. Hence it declares Mind to be in and of matter, and Life to be Infinity entering man's nostrils, so that matter should become Soul. Error begins with person, instead of Principle, as the producer, and explains Deity through mortal and finite figures.

“Behold the man is become as one of Us.” This could not be the utterance of Truth or Science, for, according to the record, man was fast degenerating, and never had been God.

The condemnation of mortals to till the ground means this — that they should so improve material belief, that it must send forth germs tending upward spiritually. Man, created by God, was given dominion over the whole earth. The notion of a material universe is utterly opposed to the theory of man as evolved from Mind. Such