Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/70

58 should multiply instead of diminish; this travelling should be towards life instead of death; and as we journey, we should develop more and more the infinite capacities of humanity, which endow it with the supreme control of the earth.

Grafting holiness upon unholiness, and opining that sin is forgiven when it is not destroyed, is as foolish as straining out gnats and swallowing camels. Our beliefs about a Supreme Being, and the practice growing out of them, are contradictory. We admit that God hath almighty power, is a “present help in time of trouble,” and yet we rely on a drug to heal disease, as if senseless matter had more power than sensible Spirit.

Common opinion admits that a man may take cold in the act of doing good, that evil can trespass on Love's domain. The Science of Christianity endows Spirit with omnipotence, assigns rewards to righteousness, and denies that matter can create or destroy.

Error abounds where truth should much more abound. If God were understood, instead of merely believed, this faith would establish health. The accusation of the rabbis, “He maketh himself as God,” was the justification of Christ, for to the Christian there is no other self than God. This thought incites the more exalted worship of self-abnegation. Spiritual perception brings out the possibilities of being, and destroys reliance on aught but God, so making man the image of his Maker in deed and in Truth.

We are prone to believe either in more than one Supreme Ruler, or in some power less than God. We imagine that Mind can be imprisoned in a sensuous body. We try to believe, when the body (in God's