Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/119

Rh the act of doing good, and that this cold may produce fatal pulmonary disease; as if evil could overbear the law of Love, and check the reward for doing good. The Science of Christianity endows Spirit with omnipotence, assigns sure rewards to righteousness, and denies that matter can heal or make sick, create or destroy.

If God were understood, instead of merely believed, this understanding would establish health. The accusation of the rabbis, “He maketh himself as God,” was really the justification of Christ, for to the Christian the only true Spirit is God. This thought incites to a more exalted worship and self-abnegation. Spiritual perception brings out the possibilities of Being, destroys reliance on aught but God, and so makes 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. When the material body has gone to ruin, when matter has overmastered life, and destroyed itself, then we try to believe that the deathless Principle, or Soul, may escape from it and live.

The sinner is a suicide. Sin kills itself, but death is regarded as a stepping-stone to immortality and bliss. The Bible calls death an enemy; and Jesus overcame death, instead of yielding to it. To him, therefore, it was not the threshold over which he must pass to Life and glory.

God has no need to kill a man, in order to give him eternal Life, for God Himself is this Life. He is at once the centre and circumference of Being.