Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/193

Rh therefore cannot spring from Intelligence. To all that is unlike unerring and eternal Mind, this Mind saith,

“Thou shalt surely die;” and elsewhere the Scripture saith that dust returns to dust. The non-intelligent relapses into unreality. The Immortal never produces the mortal, and Good cannot result in evil. As God himself is Good and is Spirit, so goodness and spirituality must be immortal. Their opposites, evil and matter, are mortal error, and error is the opposite of Truth. If one is real, the other is unreal, and cannot be the outcome of God.

Natural history presents vegetables and animals as preserving their original species, like reproducing

like. A mineral is not produced by a vegetable, nor a man by the brute. In reproduction, throughout the entire round of nature, the order of genus and species is preserved. This points to the spiritual Truth and Science of Being. Error relies upon a reversal of this order, asserts that Spirit produces matter, and consequently all the ills of flesh; and therefore that Good is the author of evil. These suppositions contradict even the order of natural science.

The realm of the real is spiritual. The opposite of Spirit is matter, and the opposite of the real is the

unreal, or material. Matter is an error of statement. This error in the premise leads to errors in the conclusion, in every statement into which it enters. Nothing we can say or believe regarding matter is true, except that matter is unreal, and is therefore a belief, which has its beginning and ending.