Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/544

532 sickness, and death; animal magnetism; mesmerism. The Devil is the lust of the flesh, which saith: —

I am life and intelligence in matter. There is more than one mind, for I am mind, — a wicked mind, self-made, hut created out of God's materials, and put into the opposite of Mind, termed Matter, thence to reproduce a mortal universe and mortal men, not after the image and likeness of Spirit, but after my own image.

I replenish the earth with venomous reptiles, devouring beasts, — with the forms of life, rising from a mollusk up to sinning, sick, and dying man. More subtle than any beast of the field, I claim this deceit as normal, — that non-intelligence matures from an egg, up to what I term Intelligence. Mortals, alias minds, learn from me to claim evil as more real than good, and as eternal. I claim also that the opposite of God originates in God; else evil and matter must be self-creative powers, co-equal and co-eternal with Deity. As a lie I have the subtlety tn say, and to make it appear, that evil is more successful than good; and that a lie is the truth, or else that Truth is the father of the lie. I declare that the Lord knows all about sin; and. having sin in Mind, He must evolve it as the necessary reflection of His own Mind. Hence I decide that a mortal sinner is God's child, — His own image and likeness.

My first appearance, as a snake, coiled about the Tree of Knowledge, was to give my signet to error (which I name Matter) as having life and mind, — besides material senses, whence all human knowledge shall proceed, and through which it shall be received. This so-called sense of matter is worse than nonsense, hut my progeny, having a material basis, will accept it as truth, and take for granted all this evolution of error and subtlety.

Do not ask who made me, but infer the soft impeachment that God made me. My mythical origin, as material sense and mortal mind, I shall dignify as the appearing of man's