Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/160

140 Sickness, sin, and death are not true and good. They are false errors, which Truth never created. Perfection

does not animate imperfection. Inasmuch as God is good, and the fount of all Being, He does not produce moral or physical deformity. Therefore it is not produced by Truth, but by illusion, and is the mirage of error. Divine Science reveals these grand facts. On their basis Jesus demonstrated Life, never fearing or obeying evil in any form.

If we derive all our conceptions of man from what is seen between the cradle and the grave, happiness and goodness can have no abiding-place in him, and the worms will rob him of all; but Paul writes: “The law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”

Man, undergoing birth, maturity, and decay, is like the beasts and vegetables, — subject to laws of decay. If

man were dust in his earliest stage of existence, we might admit the hypothesis that he returns eventually to his primitive condition; but man was never more nor less than man.

If man flickers out in death, or sprang from nothingness into Being, there must be an instant when God is without His idea, when there is no full reflection of Mind.

Man is neither young nor old. He has neither birth nor death. He is not a beast, a vegetable, or a migratory

mind. He does not pass from the mortal to the Immortal, from evil to Good, or from Good to evil. Such admissions cast us headlong into darkness and dogma. Even Shakespeare's poetry pictures age as infancy, as helplessness and decadence,